Tove Jansson (1914–2001) was born in Helsinki into Finland’s
Swedish-speaking minority. Her father was a sculptor and her mother
a graphic designer and illustrator. Winters were spent in the
family’s art-filled studio and summers in a fisherman’s cottage on
the shore of the Gulf of Finland, a setting that would later figure
in Jansson’s writing for adults and children. Jansson loved books
as a child, and set out from an early age to be an artist; her
first illustration was published when she was fifteen years old;
four years later a picture book appeared under a pseudonym. After
attending art schools in both Stockholm and Paris, she returned to
Helsinki, where in 1940s and ’50s she won acclaim for her paintings
and murals. From 1929 until 1953 Jansson drew humorous
illustrations and political cartoons for the left-leaning
anti-Fascist Finnish-Swedish magazine Garm, and it was there that
what was to become Jansson’s most famous creation, Moomintroll,
a hippopotamus-like character with a dreamy disposition, made his
first appearance. Jansson went on to write about the adventures of
Moomintroll, the Moomin family, and their curious friends in a
long-running comic strip and in a series of books for children that
have been translated throughout the world, inspiring films, several
television series, an opera, and theme parks in Finland and Japan.
Jansson also wrote novels and short stories for adults, of which
Sculptor’s Daughter, The Summer Book, Sun City, The Winter Book,
and Fair Play have been translated into English. In 1994 she was
awarded the Prize of the Swedish Academy. Tove Jansson and her
companion, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, continued to live part-time
in a cottage on the remote outer edge of the Finnish archipelago
until 1991.
Kathryn Davis has received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize,
the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of many
novels, including Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Hell, The
Walking Tour, The Thin Place, and Versailles. In 2006 she received
the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. She teaches at Washington
University in St. Louis and lives in Vermont.
“This slim, magical, life-affirming novel tells the story of a
young girl and her grandmother, who spend their summer together on
a small, isolated island in the Gulf of Finland. Absent of
sentimentality, full of love and humor and wisdom, this is a tale
about how much fun two people can have in the middle of nowhere,
when they are practicing social isolation in earnest.” —Elizabeth
Gilbert, The New York Times
“I loved it and it's a perfect read for a summer which will, I
think, be memorable for many of us as a kind of shadow season, a
time carved out from normal life and defined by the absence of
normality.” —Eve Tushnet, Patheos
"It's deceptively simple, refreshingly unembellished, distilled,
grounded in sensory experience, and absolutely direct. It's
comforting for precisely the same reasons it's unsettling, like
standing on the shore looking across a dark sea at a horizon you
swear you could almost touch." —Rain Taxi
"Poetic understatement, dry humor and a deep love for nature are
obvious throughout her oeuvre. . . . The book is as lovely,
as evocative as a film by Hayao Miyazaki." —Time Out New York
“Jansson's clear prose—capable of sentiment without being
sentimental—contains multitudes. The Summer Book is bright but
dense; it is slim enough to read in a day but holds a whole world
between its covers.” —Powell’s Books “Tove Jansson was a
genius. This is a marvelous, beautiful, wise novel, which is also
very funny.” —Philip Pullman“A wise, joyous book . . . it unfolds
the knowledge and the beauty of the two lives it embraces–old
wisdom and young discover, intertwining like vines.” —Rex Reed“The
Summer Book manages to make you feel good as well as wise, without
having to make too much effort . . . [it] says so much that we want
to hear in such an accessible form, without ever really saying
anything at all.” —The Independent"Few books since Robinson Crusoe
have evoked the joys of island living so powerfully as this Finnish
novella." —The Observer, "Paperback of the Week""The Summer Book is
a marvellously uplifting read, full of gentle humour and wisdom."
—Daily Telegraph (London)"A marvellous book . . . The prose is
sublime: plain, but not oppressively so." —The Independent"A . . .
beautiful novel which blends humour and poetry with detailed
observation of tiny things." —Daily Mail"It's hard to describe the
astonishing achievement of Jansson's artistry . . . a perfection of
the small, quiet read." —The Guardian, "Book of the Week""A
wonderful novel to devour in the sunshine . . . full of charm and
character." —The Independent, "50 Best Books for Summer""Every so
often, a book is published that captures something in us . .
. The Summer Book is one of those." —Daily
Telegraph“Responses, conversations, and observations yield quietly
reflective and funny ruminations on life and death.” —The
Age“Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson’s twin talent for
surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and
someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the
meaning embedded in the most mundane act or turn of phrase.” —Ali
Smith“This is a wonderful, life-affirming, spirited book. Reading
it was a tonic.” —Chris Stewart“Eccentric, funny, wise, full of
joys and small adventures. This is a book for life.” —Esther
Freud"The Summer Book is beautiful and warm, with the kind of
wisdom we can adapt to our everyday lives." —Liv Ullmann"Take a
book in which there is no plot but bucketloads of positive feelings
presented simply, and it will become a cult. Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance and Jonathan Livingston Seagull were both
bestsellers; no one could say what either was really about, but
everyone could quote a meaningful truism from them. The Summer Book
is in this mould: it manages to make you feel good as well as
wise." —The Independent
"The Summer Book is pure loveliness. The movements of tides
and winds and boats and insects loom larger for our narrator than
the currents of history, and the profound quiet of the setting—I’m
reminded of Akhil Sharma’s description of a prose like 'white
light'—allows us to hear Jansson’s unsparing and ironic tenderness,
a tone that remains purely her own, even in translation."
—Garth Risk Hallberg, The Millions
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