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What Members Thought
Sweet and sad.
Oct 17, 2015
Dioni
rated it
it was amazing
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review of another edition
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First published at: http://www.meexia.com/bookie/2016/04/...
I knew about Tove Jansson only in the recent years, after I moved to Europe, from her beloved series Moomin. I didn't grow up with Moomin, but fell in love immediately with the white hippo looking characters. Today I have a Moomin soft toy, Moomin shirt, and Moomin postcards stuck on my bookshelf :) - all without having read or watched the series.
The Summer Book is a standalone non-Moomin grownup book, and it seems very critically accla ...more
I knew about Tove Jansson only in the recent years, after I moved to Europe, from her beloved series Moomin. I didn't grow up with Moomin, but fell in love immediately with the white hippo looking characters. Today I have a Moomin soft toy, Moomin shirt, and Moomin postcards stuck on my bookshelf :) - all without having read or watched the series.
The Summer Book is a standalone non-Moomin grownup book, and it seems very critically accla ...more
These gentle regionalist sketches set on a tiny island in Finland are quaintly humorous, but somehow never sentimental, perhaps due to their frank reckoning with aging and death. A six-year-old girl, Sophie, spends the summer with her grandmother after the death of her mother; the father who putters with fishing nets in the background is probably dealing with his own grief, but this isn't his story. This is the story of a clever, capable woman well past the age of being taken seriously and a pre
...more
A very beautiful book. I want to call it lyrical, though that might not be the right word, as it has a very sparse and almost unemotional feel to it.
The chapters are structures as 'vignettes', as it says in the back-copy, but really it is about a grandmother and her granddaughter, Sophia, living on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. The father is around, but barely enters the picture at all. It is briefly mentioned that the mother has died, and both father and Sophia seem to be traumatized. I ...more
The chapters are structures as 'vignettes', as it says in the back-copy, but really it is about a grandmother and her granddaughter, Sophia, living on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. The father is around, but barely enters the picture at all. It is briefly mentioned that the mother has died, and both father and Sophia seem to be traumatized. I ...more
What a sweet book! Lovely vignettes and full of simple, wise anecdotes. Of course, it also presents a calm, idyllic life which will make you long for more simplicity in your own! Either that, or it will give you a bit of wanderlust for Scandinavian/Northern summers.
Some favorite quotes (besides the ones I posted in comments as I went along):
"That's strange, Grandmother thought. I can't describe things any more. I can't find the words, or maybe it's just that I'm not trying hard enough. It was su ...more
Some favorite quotes (besides the ones I posted in comments as I went along):
"That's strange, Grandmother thought. I can't describe things any more. I can't find the words, or maybe it's just that I'm not trying hard enough. It was su ...more
Apr 27, 2011
Kate
marked it as to-read
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review of another edition
Shelves:
library,
coasters,
found-in-translation,
nyrb,
scandinavian-lit,
20th-century-fic,
finland,
favorite-presses,
summer
Aug 14, 2013
Trevor
rated it
really liked it
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review of another edition
Shelves:
nyrb-classics,
1972
