Tove Jansson, The Summer Book. 1972. Trans. from the Swedish by Thomas Teal (New York: New York Review Books, 2008).
It’s a wonderful book of vignettes from a summer on an island, with a six-year-old girl, her father (who’s nearly invisible), and her eighty-five-year-old grandmother. The shadow of mortality hangs over everything.
I wonder how many readers have known someone born in the eighteen-hundreds. I can count one grandparent. How about you?
[Thomas Teal is a distinguished translator of Tove Jansson’s work. I hope that NYRB will add a paragraph about him when this work is up for its next printing.]
Tuesday, December 21, 2021
Q & Q & Q & A
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comments: 8
Both my grandfathers were born in 1892 (one was long dead before I was born, and the other died when I was a young boy), my grandmother on my mother's side was born in 1896 (she died in 1979). And, although I never met the famous model railroader E. L. Moore who was born in 1898 (he also died in 1979), I've written a lot about him.
3 of my grandparents were born in the late 1800s, and I knew them all. In middle school (we called it junior high school), for an assignment in a class, I interviewed my maternal grandfather. I was fascinated as he remembered how people ran into the street to look up and see an airplane for the first time. Imagine never having seen an airplane. Having grown up in a town where there was a small airport, seeing airplanes was very ordinary, completely unworthy of any special attention.
Both of my daughters were born in the late 1990s. I wonder what their grandchildren will be fascinated about when they recount things from their early days.
I love The Summer Book,--Tove Jansson gets the weirdness of childhood right. Children aren't little adults, they're giant weirdos!
A grandmother was born in 1900, so I just missed knowing someone born in the 1800s. Hm... come to think of it, I met a great aunt who must have been, but I didn't really know her.
--Frex = Fresca
Jim and Joe, thanks for sharing your connections. My nineteenth-century grandfather was not the kind of fellow to pose questions to, but I’m glad that I asked my dad and mom about details of life that would now be unrecoverable. (My mom’s still with us, but a lot of the past is lost to her.)
Fresca, do you have any recommendations about the other NYRB Jansson books? They are Fair Play, The True Deceiver, The Woman Who Borrowed Memories.
My 1897-born grandmother loved to share stories about her childhood.
And I loved The Summer Book, too! Le livre d'un été, so is titled the French translation. By Tove Jansson, I could recommend L'art de voyager léger (it means The Art of Traveling Unencumbered, I think: I don't know what the English title is, if it has been translated).
Thanks,Tororo. I’ll look for it.
Yes, it’s available in English as Travelling Light. I’m going to get it via interlibrary loan and see if or how it overlaps with the NYRB book of selected short stories. Thanks for the recommendation.
Oh well — not available to borrow. But The Woman Who Borrowed Memories has nine of its stories.
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