Tove Jansson’s Healing Solitude
Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book takes us to an apparently idyllic setting: an island off the coast of Finland where the young Sophia spends the summer with her father and grandmother. But right from the start Jansson lets us know that this is not Eden. The grandmother’s false teeth go missing and the little girl helps her search for them in the undergrowth. When Sophia wades into the freezing gulf, the grandmother stays on the shore. Sophia hesitates: “She forgets I’ve never swum in deep water unless somebody was with me.” Not until very end of the chapter do we learn that the grandmother did quietly notice Sophia’s apprehension.
Like in the relationship between grandmother and granddaughter, there is much in The Summer Book that stays beneath the surface. But that, Jansson seems to say, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The small island belongs to the natural world more than it does to its human inhabitants. Here abstract language isn’t the only way to create meaning and communicate affection. In fact, it can get in the way of the gentle attention to both living beings and inanimate objects that that the characters — and Tove’s understated prose — practice.
“[Y]ou can’t depend on people who just let things happen,” Sophia says, but the grandmother knows that often that is precisely what one ought to do. When Sophia’s father orders Dutch flower bulbs and decides to turn part of the island into an intensely cultivated garden, the rest of the island turns brown. Sophia calls the special hose the father gets from the mainland, an “orange plastic sausage,” and it’s as incongruous as it is unnecessary. Reflecting on a smaller, uninhabited island, the narrator says that the it “takes care of itself”: “It drinks melting snow and spring rain and, finally, dew, and if there is drought, the island waits for the next summer…The flowers are used to it, and wait quietly in their roots.”
Still, Sophia is no flower. Throughout the book she longs for companionship beyond that which the grandmother can provide. Sophia’s mother has recently died, and her father seems more interested in exotic flowers than in his own daughter. Another little girl briefly visits the island, but Sophia only likes her because of her hair. The girl has three different names, but is too timid to join Sophia on her adventures. When her hair is ruined after a swim, Sophia is thoroughly disappointed.
Sophia’s next visitor, a cat named Moppy causes not only frustration but heartbreak. Sophia loves Moppy, but the cat remains aloof. “It’s funny about love,” Sophia reflects, “The more you love someone, the less he likes you back.” This insight doesn’t diminish her love for Moppy, but when the cat begins to hunt for birds and small animals, she has to take a step back. Even after that, though, Sophia stays attached to Moppy, realizing that she can’t replace him with a more amenable cat.
Mortality haunts the islands in ways small and large. There are the dead animals that the cat leaves on Sophia’s doorstep, an angleworm that doesn’t die but mysteriously splits in half, a storm that threatens the island and that Sophia believe she’s caused by praying to God. There are also constant reminders of the grandmother’s frailty, signs that Sophia often disregards. In a moving passage the grandmother reflects on the fading not only of experience but also of its memory: “I mean it all seems to shrink up and glide away…And things that were a lot of fun don’t mean anything anymore.” The grandmother was the first woman Scout and now, she tells Sophia, she can’t even remember what it was like to spend the night in a tent.
It is the bond between Sophia and her grandmother that makes mortality manageable. Sophia responds to her grandmother’s lament by telling her what it was like to sleep alone in a tent for the first time. Her grandmother, in turn, helps Sophia write a “book” about angleworms, explaining how it’s possible for them to split in half. When Sophia is racked with guilt, believing that her prayers called up a violent storm, the grandmother tells her that she herself had wished for the same storm much earlier. It’s a therapeutic process that, as Kathryn Davis writes in the introduction, centers on Sophia’s nearly unspoken loss of her mother. Tove Jansson herself lost her mother, the accomplished artist Signe Hammarstern, shortly before she began composing of the book. Jansson was 60 at the time, Signe 88, but the loss was profound nonetheless.
The book, however, offer its readers much more than a simple therapeutic narrative. Tove writes about her characters with rare humor and compassion. There are no clichés, no set pieces or recourse to easy morality. Throughout the book, the characters subvert their gender roles and positions within the family, but they do so as a matter of course with no banners calling attention to their acts of rebellion. Gender here is a lighter form of differentiation, hovering over the characters’ more vital passions.
Ever since Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, islands have represented a modern kind of individualism — the “civilized” man recreating himself and his world in conditions of extreme isolation. It is part of a Western humanist tradition in which individual identity is stable and self-contained. In The Summer Book Jansson offers an antidote to those views. The small island and its few human inhabitants co-create a fragile and singular world. Like the island itself, the characters’ identities are always in flux. Sophia is growing up with an experience of loss, but that loss doesn’t have to define her, just as the grandmother refuses to be defined by her gender and age.
At a time of social distancing when many of us are asked to be little Crusoes in our homes, Jansson reminds us that solitude — though not isolation — can be healing. Yet the regeneration that the characters and the reader experience doesn’t happen without some effort. Following the island’s rhythms and values may come naturally to the young Sophia, but for anyone a little older it takes a conscious practice of paying attention to the things that modern society devalues and letting go of its glittering rewards.
