THE SUMMER BOOK by Tove Jansson Sad that summer’s ending Quick! Treat yourself to this slim masterpiece and listen in!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Listeners, readers, welcome to the Foxed Page, where we dive
deep into the very best books. You'll come away with
a richer understanding of the text at hand. All well,
I need to read everything a little better. I'm Kimberly Ford,
one time adject professor, best selling author, and PhD in literature,
and you guys, I could not be happier Today. We
are going to dive into The Summer Book by Tove Janson.

(00:28):
This is a book that I absolutely love. I am
sitting here on August nineteenth, twenty twenty five. The summer
still feels like it's in full swing, but definitely there's
a slight change in the light, a little bit of
a tinge of fall, and there seems to be no
better time than to dive into a book called the
Summer Book. And part of the reason why this seems
perfect for the end of the summer is that this

(00:50):
is a book translated from the Swedish that is absolutely gorgeous,
and it is absolutely the most incredible evocation of summer.
But it's also tinged with a lot of melancholy. I
first read this book a long time ago. I came
across it only because I was so drawn in by
the cover. I also love the New York Review of
Books and their whole series of books. If you're on

(01:12):
the YouTube, you can see the cover that I'm holding
up here. They do an incredible job of bringing out
translated authors from many different languages, and I just kind
of stumbled Upontova Janson. Then, of course I don't even
know if I'm pronouncing her name right, jan Son. Right
from the top here, I'm going to get off my chest.
I am about ten point six percent Danish, that is

(01:33):
according to twenty three and meter, which I know is
a little bit now, you know, non grata. I used
to be like eleven point two percent Danish, and then
you know, as their data pool got bigger, my percentage
of danishness got less. I also, despite my heritage, really
did not have a very good understanding of how Scandinavia works,
because one of my kids had a Swedish roommate and

(01:55):
I just thought, hey, and I would be so simpatico
because we were both, you know, Scandinavian, and apparently the
Swedes and the Danish have never gotten along very well.
But when I discovered the Summer Book and discovered Tibe
Janson which is that's how I'm going to just decide,
I'm going to say her name. I did that thing
where immersed myself completely in her literary output, and happily
The New York Review of Books has several of her titles.

(02:18):
The Summer Book is far and away the best of them.
But if you want to immerse yourself in the Scandinavian winter,
several of her books do that just as well as
this one is immersing us in the Summer. I also
have to say, and you probably saw this on the
description when I read it this time. I've probably read
this book I don't know, four or five times. It's
very slim and deceivingly easy to read. Actually, you can

(02:41):
move through it fairly quickly, although I would advise you
to really drink it in a little slowly, just because
of the density and the beauty of all of the
tiny details of this book. But this time, when I
read it through, I was so struck with this notion.
I mean, this sounds very obvious if you've read the book,
but this dual perspective between the granddaughter and the grandmother

(03:02):
sort of left out the person in the middle, although
it also encompasses, of course, the person in the middle,
and I was thinking so much about those of us
who who have aging parents, which honestly, at this point
in my life seems like everyone I know. It was
so magical to both be transported back into just the
delight and the perplexity and the large emotions of being

(03:25):
a child, and also to enter into the mind of
a woman who is very much at the end of
her life and who has an enormous amount to say
about what it is to be getting older. I found
this read through my own read through both like really
very kind of eerie and poignant in many ways, but
also really inspirational. So if you are someone if you

(03:46):
are someone with aging parents and you haven't picked up
the book yet, I really recommend you do. So today
we are going to be talking about the book kind
of in its entirety, but mostly we're going to be
talking about certain elements of it. It is not a
book that has a lot of plot, although a lot
happens in the book, so I'm not sure that there
will be kind of spoilers in the traditional sense of that.

(04:07):
And also the major plot point happens literally like five
pages into the book. So whether or not you read
it welcome. I cannot wait to really dive into the
genius of Toba Jansen. For those of you who like
an agenda, here is what we're up to today. We're
going to do a bio of Tovi Yanson. It will
be fairly brief. Anyone listening on the podcast, If you

(04:28):
have never watched the lectures that I'm giving on the YouTube,
this might be a good one. There are going to
be lots and lots of illustrations that I think are
really a beautiful compliment in addition to the many beautiful
illustrations that are already in the text. So if you
feel like checking out the lecture with a bunch of
images feathered through, check out the Fox page on YouTube.
So we're going to do a bio of Toba Janson.

(04:50):
Then we're going to dive into the text. We'll talk
about the cover art, we'll talk about the illustrations, we'll
talk about the opening. We're then going to talk about
the incredible narrative stance. I alluded to the fact that
really throughout the novel, it's not a novel. It's totally
a collection of short stories. Although that's an interesting point
because it is very much a collection of short stories.

(05:11):
These are sort of sketches or vignettes, although calling them
that makes that description feel way too light. These are
not light little trifles. These are in fact, really well developed,
really beautiful, and very deep evocations of whatever it is
she's trying to tell, and many do have really poignant
arcs unto themselves, and the whole thing kind of adds

(05:32):
up to this one beautiful evocation of summertime in Finland.
One quick note on that. In the introduction my copy
has Catherine Davis, who is an amazing writer. She talks
about it taking place over the course of one summer.
I think in many ways this is evoking many different summers,
if you want to get nitpicky about it. But it's
very satisfying to think of it as an amalgam of

(05:55):
these many different visions that really do give us a
very complete sense of the art of a summer, but
one that is pretty distinct for these three characters, which
we will get to in a moment. So we're going
to talk about the narrative stance and the incredible way
that Toby Jansun is She's keeping a lot of distance
from each of the characters, but absolutely plumbing the depths

(06:15):
of the grandmother and of the granddaughter. We're then going
to talk about the structure of the book because it
is these kind of standalone sections. You both have a
sense of the breath. She's able to talk about a
lot of different things because she's not beholden to a
certain arc. But there's also this incredible accretion of a
handful of different things that she's coming out from different directions,

(06:37):
and they sort of develop because we see them in
all of these different contexts. We also have incredible echoes
in amongst all of the different I mean, I guess
there's stories. I keep wanting to call them chapters, but
they really are distinct stories. So the structure is unique
and important. We're going to, you know, throughout the whole time,
we're going to be looking at the amazing prose. There
is so much to dig into in this book. Okay,

(06:58):
quick biography of Tove Janson. She was born in nineteen fourteen,
died in two thousand and one. She was Finnish, but
she was part of this small minority of Finnish people
who speak Swedish. The book was written in Swedish. It's
interesting to note the different times when the grandmother in
the Summer book talks about being from Sweden, or talks
about the language that is most familiar to her, which

(07:20):
is Swedish, because there is a certain amount of pride
and a certain amount of distance between the grandmother and
the granddaughter, because the granddaughter is firmly Finnish and the
grandmother is Swedish. So we have Tove Janson who grew
up in Finland but is in this Swedish speaking minority.
She grew up in a very bohemian family. I believe
she was the oldest of the children. The family was

(07:42):
very sort of radical and certainly very leftist, and also
very artistic, so her mother was a graphic designer, her
father was a sculptor, so there was a lot of
emphasis on art and creative expression in their household. Toove
Janson herself was very bookish but also really artistic. Began
drawing when she was a young child. She published her
first illustration. I think when she was like fifteen years old.

(08:05):
I'm qualifying some of these things because I don't have
the exact years in my notes. I had one listener
who got very upset about my biographies and the fact
that I was not more painstaking about the facts of
these people. But I like to think that you all
are here for my analysis of the literature, not my
biographies of the authors. And I can tell you that
the information that I'm providing can be double checked on Wikipedia,

(08:27):
but also is pretty solid. So she had some success
as a young person, as a teenager in publishing her drawings,
and around the same time her mother was writing for
a very leftist newspaper. It was called Garum, and this
is a paper that took the very bold step of
really holding out against a lot of the run up

(08:47):
to the Second World War, really kind of stood its
ground as a leftist paper. Around her sort of early twenties.
She didn't leave home until she was twenty eight years old,
was a very close knit family, and by that time
she had begun to have success with this whole line
of drawings. That was a comic strip called the Movement's
Mooman Troll. So I need to emphasize this a little bit,

(09:08):
and anyone on the YouTube can see all sorts of
Moomen stuff. But if you are someone certainly from Scandinavia
or from Japan, these movements are very very big in Japan,
where they have an amusement park, apparently a whole line
of lunch boxes, all sorts of movement stuff. But also
if you are European, it would be sort of like
if Walt Disney was able to suddenly pivot and write

(09:30):
just like an incredible body of work. So she has
this incredible and lucrative and very successful career as a
cartoonist and also becomes very well known for this, for
this incredible fiction that she is writing. She and her
partner Tuliki I have to look at my notes for this,
Tuliki Pietila. I mean, I do not know how I'm

(09:52):
pronouncing all of that, but they were partners and they
lived together on They're just gorgeous photographs. If you are
on the YouTube, I will post some of those. They
lived on a rock, essentially on an island very much
like the one that we see here. And we also
know that the family, the yan Stone family, and then
later Tovey and her partner, they all spent much of

(10:15):
their summer times as much as they possibly could on
these fairly remote islands in Finland. So I have not
done a full immersion into the world of the movements,
although I find them very compelling But what I love
most about the artistic production of Tove Janson is this
incredible set of illustrations that we have in the Summer Book.
I'm always just like wowed by people who have this

(10:37):
kind of polymath kind of situation. She clearly had a
very incisive political mind, also could write to some of
the most remarkable prose I have read, and can make
amazing illustrations. It is such a delight to look through
this collection and see all of these illustrations. I am
not someone who loves like an illustration that is too

(10:57):
much on the nose, and some of the I like
wasn't that wild about. But there's a scale to what
she is doing that is so interesting, and I found
it just this really beautiful companion, especially because some of
the landscape was not, in fact, very familiar to someone
who grew up in northern California. And if you have
found the Fox page because you are someone who wants

(11:19):
to learn to read better, which you all know that
I don't love that idea of reading better because I
feel like however you read is the perfect way for
you to read. But if you want to get more
out of what you're reading, the most compelling advice is
simply to pay more attention. So one of the things
that you might have missed if you were not paying
attention is this gorgeous illustration on the cover of this book.

(11:40):
If you're on the YouTube, I'm holding it up for
you to see right here. So again, my copy is
the New York Review of Books, and we have this
very compelling colored red box with the blue type face
that I love. It's very simple, very elegant in lots
of ways. And under it we have an illustration of
an island. It is an island that is me, And

(12:01):
in that mirroring we have this idea of things being double.
We have the idea of perhaps the grandmother and the
young daughter, this idea of two generations sort of fitting
together in this beautiful way. We also have the idea
of reality and fiction. You know, you have the actual
island here in the illustration, and then you have the
reflection of it in the water. And what is fiction

(12:23):
other than a reflection of reality. I also was struck
the minute that I saw this by how much this
little island here looks like some kind of sea creature.
It's like one of It's like a child's drawing of
like the Locknest monster or something. We have kind of
this the head over here, then we have this larger body,
and then we have these rocks cropping up over here,

(12:45):
also on the same plane, that look like perhaps a tail.
It almost looks like a dragon with its wings extended.
In fact, it looks very much like the book Drufus
the Dragon. If any of you, I'll pop up a
photograph of it. It was a book that I loved
when I was little, And this is very evocative that
this bit of the island that looks like the dragon's
head looks very much like the head of Drufus the Dragon.

(13:08):
And that sounds kind of just like incidental and not
that important, But to me it was very moving that
this illustration and this book that really is an immersion
in childhood, it evoked something in me. There's something about
having illustrations in this book that makes it feel like
a children's book. I mean, it's obviously not a children's book.
It's very heavy and very dark in many ways, but

(13:31):
the idea of having a text with illustrations along with
it is something that brings us back to childhood. But
even more importantly, perhaps you know, you might just glance
at this, and you might be struck by the fact
that it looks like a dragon or a sea creature,
or maybe to you it just looked like an island reflected.
But if we look more closely, we can see in
the center here that there's a little yellow light, a

(13:53):
little beautiful kind of yellow light, in what is very
much like a little cottage in and amongst these trees
on this tiny island. And if we look even more closely,
we can see that way out on the point there
are two individuals. I'm actually wait, I'm looking at it
with my glasses on. I think they're literally three individuals. Nope,
so it almost looks like they're three individuals. But I've

(14:15):
looked at this fairly carefully. It looks very much to
me like we have a grandmother figure, an older figure
who is maybe maybe has a cane or maybe has
some sort of fishing net or some sort of butterfly net,
and behind that grandmother we have a figure of a
small child. And I have to say, if you're not me,
and you're not really digging in, you might have completely
missed this. It is something that is subtle, and it

(14:38):
is certainly overshadowed by nature, which is exactly what Tove
Janson would want here, the idea of human beings as
being talk about ephemeral, as being just very sort of
incidental in comparison with nature, with the storms, with the
kind of inhospitable world of these scaries. Those of you
who listen to the Audible book, I really liked the

(15:00):
Audible book. But it was very funny because she kept
talking about the scaries and the familiar scaries and the
far out scaries. And what that is, of course, is
s k e r r i E s a scary.
S k e r r Y is a like a
rocky island. So it's very fitting to me that we
have these teeny tiny little characters set into this really

(15:21):
beautiful illustration where nature certainly is predominant. We're not going
to spend too much time on the title. It seems
fairly straightforward to me, and in many ways this book
is very straightforward. This is prose that is really stripped down.
It's very clear that the title actually, very much like
the rest of the book, is deceivingly simple in the
sense that, yes, it is about summer, and it is

(15:42):
certainly about books. It is about the creation of art.
There are actually many books that are being written, not many,
but there's several books within books that are being written
in the scope of the text. But right from the start,
we have this idea of something that it seems very simple,
and yet once we dive in, because very complex. So
we open the book and we have this first illustration

(16:04):
that's actually not my favorite illustration, but it's a very
good example of the way that things that seem very
simple actually are very complex. Again, if you're on the YouTube,
I'm going to show you this illustration. If you look
at it quickly, it might just look like a tuft
of grass with some clouds around it. But then the
more closely you look, actually you don't have to look
at that closely, it's fairly obvious. We have what very

(16:26):
quickly becomes a profile of a grandmother, an older woman.
She's kind of like a grandmotherly hairdoo, and facing her
is a child, and that child is kind of looking
up toward the grandmother, and the child also has what
might to me they look a little bit like an angel,
like a set of angels wings. This is a book
that is really preoccupied with the idea of God in

(16:48):
this incredible way. It's not overly religious, but there's lots
of praying, but also praying in this kind of blasphemous
kind of way. We have a lot of Sophia praying
for things and then having them happen or not happen,
and there's a lot of blame of God. There's a
lot about superstition. There are many questions about sort of
how much solace you can take from God or religion.
There are lots of questions about whether life is predetermined

(17:11):
and whether or not fate is something we have any
control of. I mean, these are the very large questions
that grow out of the passages where God is evoked.
And it's very easy to understand why God would be
important because really throughout the entire book we have this
issue of death. We're about to get to it. And
what's fascinating about the presence of God is you have
a very young child's conception of God, which is very

(17:34):
confused and full of questions, and then we have the
conception of God from a much older woman toward the
end of her life, who also has questions obviously, and
the way that both of them are working out their
conceptions of God, you know, both on their own and
together is fascinating and really important given the fact that

(17:55):
death really does permeate the whole book. Okay, so after
that first all illustration, we come to our very first story.
It is called The Morning Swim. One of the ways
that you know that this is a collection of short stories. Interestingly,
it doesn't tell us on the front that it's a
novel or a collection of stories or anything else, but
that very first title should maybe tip you off to

(18:15):
the fact that this is going to be a collection
of discreete vignettes or short stories. And that's partly because
I mean, the Morning Swim. I guess that could be
a chapter title, but to me, it's very definitive in
some ways and kind of singular. It doesn't feel to
me like something that's going to build on I mean,
obviously things build on it, but it seems like that's

(18:37):
something that stands alone. I am someone who is guilty.
If you've listened for a while, you know this already.
For some reason, I tend to not pay close enough
attention to chapter titles. I mean I do when I'm
preparing a lecture, but I realize that when I'm reading
I'm just like, I don't know, I'm so excited to
dive into the next chapter that I often am not
looking closely enough at the titles. She is so good

(19:01):
with chapter titles. And of course, when you are reading
a piece of fiction that is very short, as opposed
to something like Anna Karenina or Warren Peace or all
over Twist, you can have expectations about every word in
that short fiction being very carefully chosen and being really important.
I mean, this is assuming that you are having a

(19:21):
writer who is worth her salt, so obviously, I mean.
The way to think about that too, is like poetry
is kind of like every single word, every syllable, every
single letter is extremely important. With short fiction, you have
that same feeling that every word needs to be chosen carefully.
If you have a novel, sometimes you know you can
excuse a scene here or there, and certainly with something

(19:42):
very very long, the prose may feel somewhat uneven. But
here we begin with the story called the Morning Swim.
It's interesting to note, now having finished the book, that
the last story is called August. And when you think
of any of these things, you should be thinking about
them in all of their meanings. August of course, meaning
you know, the month that comes toward the end of

(20:02):
the summer, but also August in the sense of like
venerable and sort of stately and important. I don't know,
I'm thinking of an August senator, like back from like
the Greek days or something. But we have this idea
of mourning the morning, both meaning morning of course, like
in the am, but also mourning in terms of like
mourning the loss of something. We have both of those

(20:25):
folded into this first title, but also here in this case,
the idea of mourning as being early, as being the
start of something is helpful at the beginning of the
book because it's it's helping us start the whole thing.
Whereas August is definitely, I mean, in a book called
the Summer Book, August is definitely speaking to things ending
and kind of wrapping up. So now that we've paid

(20:45):
appropriate attention to the very first title there, we're going
to dive into this first passage. It was an early,
very warm morning in July, and it had rained during
the night. The bearre granite steamed, the moss and crevices
were drenched with moisture, and all the colors everywhere had
deepened below the veranda. The vegetation in the morning shade

(21:08):
was like a rainforest of lush, evil leaves and flowers,
which she had to be careful not to break. As
she searched. She held one hand in front of her
mouth and was constantly afraid of losing her balance. Oh
my gosh, this is just so gorgeous. It is also
so full of so many different things that should be

(21:28):
popping into your head. I mean, obviously, when I am
looking at something like this up close, I'm going to
see things that you, perhaps as the reader, are not
going to pick up on your first read through. But
when we take the time to slow down and really
look at this prose, then the true like insane genius
of Toby Yanston emerges. So we have this omniscient third

(21:49):
person narrator. It's very important to understand the narration of
this book. It's a third person I mean, this is
this is like a godlike omniscient spirit or force or
something that is able to tell us all of these
different things that people are feeling. But there's also an
incredible remove It's third person in the sense that is
really sort of pulled back in many ways. Right here,

(22:10):
we have. It was an early, very warm morning in July,
and it had rained during the night, so we're almost
in kind of like a mother nature mode. We're almost
in a godlike mode. I also like the fact that
it's beginning with this passive voice, the verb to be
in the sense it was, because there's kind of a
sense of things beginning from nothing and a sense of remove.

(22:35):
We're not diving into this in kind of the middle
of a conversation. We are in fact getting a really
beautiful vision a context in which to have these people.
It's also so interesting to go back and look at
the beginning of a text once you've gotten to the end.
There's an important chapter toward the end about rain and
about the importance of water and fresh water and the

(22:56):
renewing and kind of nurturing presence of rain. So it's
very cool to realize that in the very beginning also
we are talking about rain. It's also very fitting that
we move from the idea of rain and the warmth
of the morning right into a very replete description of
a landscape that's pretty unfamiliar, I mean, at least to me.

(23:18):
It Actually a lot of this book reminded me of
the Sierra. They're parts of the Sierra Nevada in northern
California that it's called Desolation Wilderness, and it's lots and
lots of this kind of outcropping of rocks, and it's
above the tree line, and it is absolutely gorgeous, and
you get a sense of the drama of nature there
because things do have to grow in tiny little crevices.

(23:40):
But we have this beautiful passage. The barre granite steamed
the moss and crevices were drenched with moisture. So even
there we have all of these different sounds. Moss has
kind of a with that lower vowel and that sibilant sound,
the s sound, and with the nasal the m sound,
we have kind of like a cozy feeling. And then

(24:01):
with the cr with that hard sea sound and those
higher vowels, we have kind of a compliment. These two
things sound very differently, and then they were drenched. You
have that ch sound that is also different, and then moisture,
so you have all of these different beautiful sounds that
really evoke for us like a lot of variety. And
we have the sense too of looking at things in

(24:22):
a very small kind of scale. We're looking at things
like moss, and then we have this idea of colors deepening.
So what she's doing right from the beginning is telling
us that we're going to look at minutia. We're going
to look at things very closely in order in order
to have our understanding of them deepened, our appreciation of them.
And then I love this next part below the veranda,

(24:45):
the vegetation in the morning shade was like a rainforest
of lush evil leaves and flowers. So evil here, of course,
should really be standing out to you. We also have
here a succession of liquids, so liquids are an ll
sound lush evil leaves and flowers, so instead of moss

(25:05):
and crevice and drenched and moisture, which is really varied.
Then we move into this zone where we have all
of these liquid sounds that are really evoking the lushness
of this place. But then we have this insertion of evil.
So throughout the entire book we have great beauty, but
it is tinged often by grief or sorrow or frustration

(25:28):
or anger or worry. And I love this inclusion here
of evil because she's tipping her hand. And then we
have this incredible introduction of a person which she had
to be careful not to break as she searched. She
held one hand in front of her mouth and was
constantly afraid of losing her balance. So we have the

(25:49):
introduction of someone. I mean, if you think about someone
with their hand in front of their mouth, that is
someone who is worried. It also is because she has
lost her false teeth, if you recall. But this is
someone who is searching for something and also afraid of
losing her balance. So if when you are reading a
text like this that feels really dense and pithy, and

(26:10):
certainly this is the case with this book, you should
try to read almost everything in terms of symbolism, in
terms of it having kind of more connotations and more
deep meaning. So in this case, she is someone who
is searching and she is also afraid of losing her balance.
So this idea of losing balance, she's at the very
end of her life and essentially is in many ways

(26:31):
heading for a fall in all the senses of that word.
And we don't know who she is yet we like
her are feeling a little unmoored as the reader, we're
kind of thrown into this idea of this woman who
is searching for something. All we know is it's she.
We don't know the age, we don't know the circumstances,
so we're a little off kilter, which really helps us

(26:52):
to understand that she also is off kilter. Then we
have the introduction of Sophia. It's really lovely how Sophia
right into because of her name and because of the
fact that it says little Sophia, which I'll read that
in one suck she becomes much clearer, which I would
argue from the beginning, at least in this story, we're
kind of in some ways more in the mind of

(27:14):
the grandmother, and that makes a lot of sense. This
was a book that was written when Tobe Jansen was
sixty years old. Her mother had recently died, so she
was someone who was older and was dealing with an
enormous amount of grief. So it makes sense to me
that often we feel somewhat closer to the mind of
the grandmother. I mean, we're certainly entering into the mind
of Sophia, and it's an incredible evocation of childhood, but

(27:38):
right from but there are many times where I feel
like we are a bit more in the mind of
the grandmother. So we have this she's afraid of losing
her balance. What are you doing, asked little Sophia, nothing,
Her grandmother answered, that is to say, she added angrily,
I'm looking for my false teeth. So the important thing here,
I would argue is this idea of angrily a woman

(28:01):
who does not suffer fools. And this is a woman
who it becomes very clear, very soon that she is
helping her granddaughter through the grief of having lost her mother,
by treating her with an enormous amount of respect, by
not coddling her, by convincing her that she can make
it through, because she takes her seriously and gives her
a lot of respect, gives this young child a lot

(28:22):
of respect. She's often very upfront with how she is feeling.
She's not trying to be selfy facing. She's also, of
course dealing with her own grief, and often that grief.
You know, she's a bit cantankerous, she's a bit salty,
this old grandmother. And so I love the idea of
anger as coming in right first and foremost. And in
terms of the grandmother's grief, she's really facing death, and

(28:45):
it's very much about her own death. And it was
very important for me when I realized at some point
that the mother, the woman who has died, which we're
about to get to, that is not the daughter of
the grandmother, if that makes sense. So this is Sophia's
paternal grandmother. So this is someone who is helping her
son and her young granddaughter through grief. But this is
someone who is not having to grieve the loss of

(29:07):
a daughter. And the reason why that is important is
because it allows the grandmother on some level. I mean,
she's obviously very preoccupied with helping her small family through
this tragedy, the loss of this young woman who is
the wife of her son and the mother of her granddaughter,
and of course she would be grieving the loss of
the daughter in law, but it is not the same
as the loss of a daughter, which I think is

(29:29):
important because it does allow her to focus on her
own death in a way that's much more cathartic and
kind of more helpful to the reader, which I'm not
sure that makes a ton of sense, but for someone,
for example, if you have an aging parent, or if
you yourself have any concerns at all about mortality, it's
more interesting to think about at least in this context,

(29:49):
it was more interesting for me to think about someone
contemplating the end of her own life in a way
that wasn't eclipsed by the idea of having lost her daughter.
Actually a very good segue. We move from the idea
of the morning swim, which begins with this beautiful narrative
passage with this evocation of nature and the idea of
the grandmother searching for her false teeth, and then goes

(30:12):
on to show very clearly the kind of sassy dynamics
between this grandmother and the young daughter and this question
of diving into something. Of course, the idea of diving
in has everything to do with I mean, to mix metaphors.
It's kind of like getting back on the horse in
some ways. This grandmother, during this very difficult time for Sophia,

(30:33):
is encouraging Sophia to take risks and to be bold
and to be brave and to dive into things unknown,
which is a very good metaphor for the rest of
her life. I mean, she's going to have to navigate
life and do bold things without her mother, and the
way that the grandmother is supporting her is really beautiful.
So then we move, you know, in not very many pages.

(30:53):
This first story and the Morning it's like four pages long.
This is also a book with lots of white space.
I mean there's a lot of space between these lines.
It's not particularly dense text, but it is amazing to
see how much she can pack into a mere four pages.
This becomes even more apparent when we get to the
chapter called Moonlight. So Moonlight is literally like a page

(31:14):
and a half long, but it is an absolutely arresting story.
So if we're thinking, by the way, we are not
going to go through all of these stories with this
kind of attention, but it's very important to look at
how Jansun, because she is an incredible writer, is setting
us up at the very beginning with all the tools
that we need to really appreciate the rest of the text.

(31:36):
So Moonlight is the second story, and right from the
start here we have sort of the crux of the story.
We begin with this evocation of the grandmother and the
granddaughter and the idea of searching and diving into things,
and the beauty of nature and the starkness and the
difficulties both of losing your balance and of drumming up

(31:56):
the courage to dive into something, and then we shift
right away into this idea of moonlight. It's very fitting
to me that the chapter describing the sort of the
crux of the whole book, the germ of the book,
and the most important thing in some ways of the
whole book, is very short and very clear. So the

(32:18):
title itself is deserving of our attention. Obviously, the idea
of the moon, we think many people are familiar with
this idea. Moon is the moon and lunar cycles are
often related to the female, in part because of our
lunar cycles, the fact that our menstrual cycles are twenty
eight days and the lunar cycle is twenty eight days.

(32:39):
But throughout human history, the moon is something that has
always been associated more with the female. So it's very
fitting that we have not only just the moon, but
the idea of moon light, the idea of something being present,
something illuminating, something being being revealing and present and beautiful.

(33:00):
We are evoking the mother, but we also are talking
about her absence. So we have the tidal moonlight, and
then we have this one time in April, there was
a full moon and the sea was covered with ice.
Sophia woke up and remembered that they had come back
to the island, and that she had a bed to
herself because her mother was dead. I mean, absolutely, just

(33:22):
such stunning, stunning pros A couple of important things here,
of course. So here we have outside the scope of
the summer. This is in April, and I do think
it's nice and sort of concise, and in many ways
I do conceive of it this way, to think of
all of this is happening over the course of one summer.
But I think that's also somewhat limiting. There are lots
of different stories that are like one summer blah blah blah,
and one summer blah blah blah, and one August and

(33:44):
one July, which to me makes it sound like it's
not like that summer and that August and that July,
which is really beautiful because the summer's kind of proliferate.
We have this idea of many, many summers, which makes
us think, you know, some of these are the grandmother's summers,
some of these are our own summers. In some ways,
I mean, it becomes many, many different summers. But here

(34:06):
we have the idea of April. So she wakes up
in April, and there's a full moon. So here we
have the presence of the moon, but we also have
the absence of the mother. It's very stark, she wakes up.
It's also interesting that they have come back to the island.
So I drummed up in my whole I drummed up
in my mind, this whole narrative. We realized later when
she does the study of the angle worm that has

(34:29):
been chopped in two. That's not the title of that,
but Sophia and her grandmother are writing a little book
after an earthworm or an angleworm was cut in half
by a spade, which obviously the death of the angle
worm and Sophia's preoccupation with it and the way she's
processing it in writing and verbally working all of those
things out with the grandmother is a very very clear

(34:51):
parallel with the way that young Sophia is trying to
work out the idea of the death of her mother.
So when she so in the midst of that book,
she talks at one point about how she hates things
that die slowly, which in my mind, I was like,
oh God, her mom died of some long and drawn out,
terrible thing. And also I had the idea that they
mostly like to be on the island, but that for

(35:13):
the mother's like decline and death, they had to be
off of the island. So they get to come back
to the island in April, which also I'm like, oh
my god, April and on a tiny island in Finland
has to be just like I mean, obviously it's icy
and it's dark, so it's not summery at all. And
we're not going to dig too carefully through this in
this chapter Moonlight. But what's really interesting is the way

(35:36):
that this very very brief chapter is telling us this
very important thing that the mother is dead. It's also
there are no euphemisms. There's a chapter later, a story later,
where the grandmother is talking about how much she hates
these euphemisms, which I'm always somehow inspired by people who
are closer to death not feeling like they need to
lean on euphemisms. It somehow makes it feel like maybe

(35:58):
death is less scary to people who who can really
like say these things clearly. It's also very interesting to
think of the fact that Toby Johnston has just lost
her mother. She's sixty years old, and yet she is
saying this in very clear terms that her mother is dead.
So we have this idea of the moonlight, the presence
and the absence of the mother. And what's gorgeous is

(36:18):
that we have kind of the slippage. We're talking about
the moon and then fairly quickly we're talking about the fire.
So there's a fire that she can see in the windows.
It's reflected doubly. So there's a lot of stuff about doubles.
So you have questions about mother daughter, you have questions
about reality and fiction. You have questions of illusion, you
have questions of life and death, things being both present

(36:40):
and absent. But I love the fact that early in
the book here the shorts, this like two pages, like
one and a half pages long, it ends with the
idea of her father putting more wood on the fire.
So right from the beginning we are seeing this father
figure as someone who is bringing light and warmth and security,
and we see that over and over again. The father

(37:01):
is actually very kind of shadowy in a way that
I like, he's a very benevolent presence. He's working all
the time, he has that incredible robe. He's obviously someone
who is going through a huge amount of grieve himself.
But again and again he's someone who he's bringing kerosene,
or he is adding things to the fire. He is
someone who is associated with warmth and with providing warmth,
which is really an important solace. I have to take

(37:24):
a quick minute here and just note that I'm not
at all surprised it has taken us like a half
an hour to dig into just the very, very beginning
of this book. That really speaks to the richness of
the prose. But it also speaks to the fact that
I need to just pick things up here a little bit,
pick up the pace. So I want to speak a
little bit about the narrative stance, because in many ways

(37:44):
it's the key to the book, and it's also just
a delightful way to look at the prose. So Catherine Davis,
in her introduction says the following. Tobe Johansson was almost
sixty when she wrote the Summer Book. She was old
enough to be a grandmother, but of course she was
also a daughter, and one who had just lost her mother,
a condition mirrored in the book's unusual point of view,

(38:06):
which hovers above and around the island and seems not
so much to move from grandmother to granddaughter as to
share them inhabiting both sensibilities in the manner of weather.
Such a gorgeous passage, but I want to take a
look at how this actually functions. So and we're going
to just look at this in terms of the morning swim,
because we already have good context for that. So the

(38:28):
grandmother is looking for her false teeth in the lush,
evil rainforest y kind of garden. And then we have
this very important passage where we move from this very
kind of like mundane idea of the teeth, which has
everything to do with being able to communicate in telling
stories and age, to one of the largest questions in
the book. We have this. So grandmother put the teeth

(38:51):
in with a smacking noise. They went in very easily.
It had really hardly been worth mentioning. When are you
going to die? Child asked, and the grandmother answered soon.
But that is not the least concern of yours. Why,
the grandchild asked, She didn't answer. She walked out on
the rock and on toward the ravine. We're not allowed

(39:14):
out there, Sophia screamed, I know. The old woman answered disdainfully.
Your father won't let either one of us go out
to the ravine. But we're going anyway because your father
is asleep and he won't know. The important thing here
is we have the narrators pulled way back, and we
really do see them exactly like Catherine Davis was describing
that the narrator is kind of sharing it, like they're

(39:36):
both kind of equally sharing the narration. At this point,
we have this beautiful the next passage, the next paragraph,
they walked across granite. The moss was slippery. The sun
had come up a good way now, and everything was steaming.
The whole island was covered with a bright haze. It
was very pretty. So they're walking out toward this ravine

(39:58):
where they're not supposed to go. The grandm mother realizes
that there is this obvious fear, of course, that she
is going to die. The child's mother has just died,
although we don't know that quite yet. So we're so
Jansone is introducing the idea of death, the most imminent
one being the death of the grandmother, and then we
are very surprised when we learn three pages later that

(40:18):
the mother has already died, And of course that element
of surprise is helping us feel the same surprise that
Sophia felt when she in fact realized that her mother
as a young woman, was going to die. And so
this next part shows us how this narrator can move
from being kind of pulled back and shared by both
of them in these broader descriptions and then kind of
enter into the minds of these people. I want to

(40:42):
go swimming, the child said. She waited for opposition, but
none came, so she took off her clothes slowly and nervously.
She glanced at her grandmother. You can't depend on people
who just let things happen. She put her legs in
the water. So it's so incredible. Well, it's very much
third person. I mean when she says she glanced at

(41:03):
her grandmother, it's not I glanced at my grandmother, obviously,
So the reader feels very you know, we're on the
same plane, and it is not confusing. We're not entering
into her thoughts, but then we kind of are, because
she says things like you can't depend on people who
just let things happen, so very deftely, we are moving
into what is essentially her thoughts. So we have the

(41:24):
two of them engaging in this idea of diving in
and at the very end, we are moving firmly and
throughout we're moving kind of you know, in and out
of the minds of both of these women, the women
the perspectives of both the grandmother and the grandchild. And
then at the end we have this gorgeous ending. The
close of each of these short stories is so important.
They're symbolic, they're wide ranging. They're like very specific and

(41:49):
plain and kind of emphatic and concise in many ways
and clear, but have all of this resonance. So we
have this, so remember that we just we're in Sophia's mind,
and literally one page later we have this, and here
we are very firmly in the grandmother's mind. The first

(42:09):
weariness came closer when we get home, she thought, when
we get back, I think I'll take a little nap,
and I must remember to tell him this child is
afraid of deep water. So here we're getting even closer
because we're actually getting into her thoughts. What's also important
is we have the first person plural, so when she
says when we get home, which is such a beautiful thing,

(42:33):
we've had third person throughout, and then suddenly we have
this we which encompasses of course the grandmother and the granddaughter,
but you also as a reader have like on a
very subtle, subconscious level, have an idea of also being included.
When we get home, we have kind of again exactly
what Catherine Davis is saying. It's a sharing of the perspective.

(42:53):
But then she says, I must tell him, meaning the papa,
that this child is still afraid of deep water, I
mean deep water, like you know you're in deep water.
Not only is it symbolic in the sense of like
deep water is ominous in many ways, but also there's
literally that like that aphorism. I mean, I'm assuming that

(43:14):
it holds up in Swedish, the idea that like being
in deep water means you're kind of in over your
head literally, I would assume, I would assume actually in
Scandinavia that they have a zillion at different like watery
sayings that have all sorts of resonance. So what's important
here is that this narrative voice can move in and
out of both of them, both of the of their
of their psychees in a way that is so deft

(43:37):
and allows the reader to really understand what they're thinking,
but also without feeling like it's complicated. It's just very straightforward.
But that's very very hard to do. She's so good.
So speaking of being bold and diving in, I want
to talk about structure in a way that I had
not planned, but I think it might be excellent. So
I'm going to just like walk through very quickly some

(43:58):
of these titles and just touch briefly on what it
is that we are seeing in each one, in the
ways that as we move through the book, this structure
of being able to move anywhere she wants in terms
of time, in terms of nature, in terms of theme,
in terms of characters. She's able to just move very
freely because these are simply short story kind of sketches

(44:20):
that she is piling up here. But what's happening is
we're having this incredible accretion of these different statements that
are all kind of playing with the same idea, whether
that is death or grief or bravery, or community or
voice or the idea of making stories. We have all
of these different sections that are all adding another voice

(44:42):
to each one of these ideas. So, for example, after Moonlight,
we have a story called the Magic Forest, which is
where we have the grandmother. She's carving things out of
pieces of wood. They're adding to nature. You have the
sense of storytelling. And then we have the of this
skull that Sophia reacts to in a very I mean,

(45:04):
I think, a very predictable way, and that she's really
afraid of this. So right in the middle of this
kind of magical family moment of creation and creativity, we
have the presence of death and how upsetting it is.
We then move on to the scolder. So a scolder
is a type of bird, and here we have the
introduction of the idea of the story within the story

(45:25):
very explicitly. There are lots of times throughout this book
where the grandmother is making up stories and it's almost,
you know, like a Shakespearean kind of play within a plaything.
The stories within the story are extremely important, and the
one that she makes up about the Scholder, she has
to kind of keep modifying it until Sophia is happy
about it. But of course, in offering all of these

(45:45):
different iterations of the story of the death of the Scholder,
I mean again, here we are coming across death for
the third story in a row. She has to keep modifying,
but she's also exposing Sophia to some of the difficulties
and some of the inevitable abilities, and some of the
kind of ways to look at death that are more difficult,
and then is eventually giving her one that feels better

(46:07):
for Sophia. We then have Berenice, which I guess we
say Bernice. I did not look this up, but I'm
fairly certain that last time I looked at this I
did last time I read the book, and Bernice is
like a Scandinavian princess, which is perfect because this Bernice
who comes is quite a bit like a princess. So
this is very interesting because we have an outsider coming in.
Anytime there is an outsider coming in, whether it's the

(46:30):
man forward the end who's building his house, or whether
it's that fisherman guy who sleeps in the seal skin
sleeping bag and is kind of itinerant. These outside people
coming in show us a huge amount about the three
of the people in this family, but it also helps
us see how deeply ingrained we are as a stranger

(46:51):
in their lives, Like we are shown so much of
what is happening for them, and you almost don't realize
how intimate everything is until you have an outside come in.
We also here have this idea of community, we have
this idea of jealousy, we have this idea of fear
and of conquering fear. Again, we have the grandmother telling
a story. We have an idea of loyalty and betrayal

(47:14):
and play. So we're adding on not just about death,
but here we're talking a little bit more about the
nuances of the way that their relationship works and the
way that life on the island works. We move on
to the pasture, where we have a beautiful sort of
vision of what heaven might be. So again we're talking
about nature, we're talking about death. We're moving on to

(47:35):
playing Venice. This was a heart wrenching piece for me.
In it, we have the idea of Sophia as kind
of evoking this mother figure and wanting to sort of
create this perfect world. And very much like the Magic Forest,
they're using elements of nature to kind of process what
it is that is happening to her, and of course
the way that Toyjanson is doing it is so kind

(47:57):
of gut wrenching but also so beautiful. Young Sophia starts
calling the grandmother mama, and the grandmother says, I can
really only be mama to your father, but you have
this real sense of both of them working through these difficulties.
And then this very elaborate thing about Venice, which seems
very far from the island but is another kind of
watery place, another place where people are trying to live

(48:20):
on water, And like many other stories in the book,
we have this elaborate kind of build up and something
tragic happens. In this case, the water comes in and
there's a storm, and they're kind of diorama of Venice
is ruined. But we have them both figuring out a
way to move through that. We're going to skip forward
a little bit. I cannot do all of them, or
else we will be here all day long. We have

(48:42):
the Cat. We have this idea of hunting and death
and mercilessness and things not turning out the way you
want them to. But then also the idea of really
loving something even though it's difficult to love, which is
that is a theme that we see over and over,
but we don't get to have the relationship we think
we want. We just get the reallylationship that we actually have.

(49:02):
There's several different chapters like the Road that have to
do with progress and have to do with the way
of life that they are so surprising, the way that
that isn't often threatened. We have that gorgeous story about
the tent where the grandmother. This was so beautiful to
me because here we have kind of a tipping of
the whole thing. The grandmother is is so distraught because

(49:23):
she can't remember what it feels like to sleep in
a tent, and we have Sophia in this case is
providing a narrative for her grandmother in this gorgeous tour
de force. But we're really exposed to some of the
grandmother's fears, and then we are able to move through them,
not in a way that's too pat or that completely
absolves us of our concerns, but in just a very beautiful,

(49:43):
grounded kind of way. One of the most unexpected stories
for me was the neighbor. So in it you have
the two of them. They're showing us so much about
island life. I mean, apparently on the island you're never
supposed to lock anything up. You just supposed to like
hang your key there and people can just like kind
of come in and check things out. But of course
progress is happening, and this neighbor isn't building this house

(50:04):
that is not to the liking of the grandmother. But
then the interaction that they have with him is so unexpected,
and we realize that we have a lot of sympathy
for this person, and that in many ways, this man
who really just wants solitude is going to be disappointed
and is going to have to grieve because he has
all this family and friends and people who are going
to help him. And the grandmother knows that what he

(50:25):
thinks he wants is not what he wants. And this
is a theme that happens again and again. The grandmother
says very plainly to Sophia, people have to make their
own mistakes. People have to kind of move through their
own lives and think they want one thing and be
disappointed and move on. It is a book that is
profoundly philosophical, but that it wears it in a very

(50:45):
very light kind of way. We have the idea of
the robe, which has everything to do with the father.
The enormous plastic sausage is speaking to the importance of
fresh water but also to the procarity of their lives.
You have that beautiful image of the end where the
grandmother is using the water to water one of the plants.
Every time we're talking about plants and the sort of

(51:07):
vulnerability of those plants, we are of course speaking to
the vulnerability of humans as well. We have that excellent
story about the crooks where the father goes out to
the party and Sophia is so angry, and this is
a talk about tour to force. This is just this
virtuoso passage where she's making up all of these different stories.
There are lots and lots of instances of the grandmother

(51:29):
trying to create narrative, which is so interesting because, of
course Tobo Janson is creating this whole, entire narrative for
us to help us move through grief and to help
us appreciate nature and appreciate the ephemeral beauty of life.
And not only is she creating this whole collection of stories,
but in many of these different stories we have a

(51:50):
smaller iteration of that same idea of the grandmother trying
to create a situation for Sophia, and once or twice
of Sophia trying to create a situation for the grandmother
that is doing that same thing that is speaking to
any one of these themes. In this case, it's about
being left out. It's about being slightly betrayed, but it's
also just a delightful story. I have to actually read

(52:10):
this because I have this page sitting right here. So
the grandfather, the father comes back and he's hung over
and he's sleeping, but he has left this large box
of chocolates and there's a note on it. Grandmother put
on her glasses and read it to herself. Love and
kisses to those too old and too young to come
to the party. How tactless, she muttered through her teeth,

(52:32):
which I loved that. I mean, again, this is kind
of this cantankerous old woman, but boy do we love her.
What does it say? What did they write? Sophia shouted,
it says her grandmother said. What it says is, which
is so excellent. We have this idea of her kind
of stalling a little bit. Then we have a colon.
We behaved very badly and it's all our fault. Forgive

(52:53):
us if you can. So the title of the book
is the Crooks, and they've cooked up this whole story
that this boat that comes, which is the father just
going out and having this delightful party. The grandmother has
spun it into this whole notion of these crooks. So
instead of this kind of trite and thoughtless and not
dramatic note that the father's left, she cooks up this

(53:13):
whole thing about the crooks. So it says, forgive us
if you can, can we Sophia asked, No, said grandmother,
which is so excellent. There's so many times when the
pose is so surprising, and often it is the grandmother
who is saying things that we wouldn't expect from a grandmother,
which is just excellent. Then Sophia says, yes, we ought

(53:34):
to forgive them. In fact, you should always forgive crooks.
How nice they really were crooks? After all, do you
think the chocolates are poisoned? No, I don't think so,
And that sleeping powder was probably pretty weak. Poor Papa,
Sophia sighed, he just barely escaped, and indeed he had
he had a headache all day long and could neither

(53:56):
eat nor work. So I love that there we have
that omniscient It's kind of a little wink to the reader, because,
of course, from Sophia's perspective, you know he has a
sleeping potion. But the reader, of course, in a bit
of dramatic irony, which is a figure of speech where
the reader has information that the character doesn't. We of
course know that he's just hungover because he was out

(54:17):
partying with the people on the boat. We honestly could
look at any small passage anywhere in this book and
talk for hours and hours about the genius of it. Also,
one quick note, when I was listening to the audible version,
one of the sort of choices that they made that
I thought was genius is that the narrator, whoever's the
person who's narrating it, she has this really excellent voice,

(54:40):
and then it's like, I can't describe, it feels very
modern and like very it's really very compelling. But then
she can modulate very very well into the voice of
the grandmother and the voice of the child. But one
of the things I loved is that whenever the grandmother
asked a question, it didn't rise in the way that
an interrogative does. So, you know, when you ask a question,

(55:02):
usually your voice goes up at the end like that,
but she doesn't do that. So she'll say things like
did you do that in a way? I mean, that's
a terrible example. But what happens is it ends up
making a grandmother feel really cantankerous and really kind of
like ill humored, but not in a bad way. It's
like she's really respecting Sophia, and she's asking questions. It's

(55:24):
not some sort of like sing songy coddling, like baby
talking grandmother. It's like someone who is speaking to Sophia
in the way, in this very matter of fact way
that she would speak with anyone. It was pretty striking.
I really liked the audible version. So just quickly to
finish up this conversation about about the structure we have
of angle worms and others. That is a title of

(55:45):
one of the stories, and of course of angle worms
and others, she's talking about other insects, but there's also
this idea of other deaths. And here we have this
beautiful idea of the way that things can regenerate and
the way that things can live on, but in a
way that is not sentimental or to ploying or sort
of false, and of course that is echoing all of

(56:07):
the different instances of death that are all kind of
echoing one another and emphasizing and adding nuances. The structure
is incredible. We then have Sophia's storm, which is another
one of these examples of this very deft way that
the grandmother has. You know, Sophia praised for a storm
and then terrible things happen, and then the grandmother, in
like a stroke of genius, absolves Sophia of her guilt

(56:29):
by saying, oh, no, wait, you didn't. This is not
your storm. Like I prayed for the storm in the morning,
I prayed before you did. So this is this is
God answering my prayers, which obviously is speaking to a
much larger question of you know, yes, the power of
prayer on some level, but also the way that we
conceive of fate and the way that we conceive of
our power in the universe and religion and heaven, and

(56:51):
the idea of an omnipotent God. It's so excellent. And
finally at the end, we have this idea of August,
and I'm going to read the first paragraph because it
is so beautiful. It also speaks to this idea of
the narrator pulling back a little bit and kind of
broadening the scope again after we've had some very specific
adventures along the way. August every year, the bright Scandinavian

(57:15):
summer nights fade away without anyone's noticing. One evening in August,
you have an air and outdoors, and all of a sudden,
it's pitch black. A great, warm, dark silence surrounds the house.
It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive.
It has come to a standstill. Nothing withers, and fall

(57:36):
is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet,
just darkness. The can of kerosene is brought up from
the cellar and left in the hall, and the flashlight
is hung up on the peg beside the door. So gorgeous,
so beautiful, but also a little bit deceiving in the
sense that there is a huge amount happening here. We

(57:56):
have the idea of light waning and of things moving
toward or darkness. So you know, you can read that
as a certain dying, a dying of the light and
the possibility. You know, when she says, all of a sudden,
things are pitch black, you have the idea of death
as being, you know, always kind of an ambush, but
it also hasn't begun to happen yet. And throughout the

(58:17):
entire book we have all of these echoes of kind
of the threat of death, and yet the way that
life moves on the way that things endure. I love
the idea too that we are ending with the idea
of kerosene, so the idea of warmth and light, and
then the idea of the flashlight as well, kind of
like doubling down on this idea of providing light and

(58:38):
then that kind of consolation. That kind of emphasis on
light is very clearly stated just right across the page here.
Grandmother had always liked this great change in August most
of all, perhaps because of the way it never varied,
and that is speaking to the way that throughout the
whole book we have these different instances, you know, the
fact that a well told story is always going to

(58:59):
provide solid us, but not complete solace. There's always going
to be something that feels kind of undone or remains
a mystery. So the point of looking at all of
those chapters in succession like that is to look at
the deft way that each one of these chapters is
really different. We have all of these different anecdotes. As
I was moving through, you know, you kind of remember

(59:19):
all of these different things that happen, and it doesn't
feel it never feels repetitive or boring or not charming.
I mean, the book is incredibly charming, but the way
it that it is looking at certain things from many,
many different angles is so genius. And not only is
Sophia being consoled, and not only is the grandmother really
thinking about how she can best face death, but the

(59:42):
reader is moving along with all of these things and
seeing from all of these different perspectives different ways that
might or might not resonate with that specific reader. In
some ways, this is like the best thing that literature does,
is taking these gigantic themes and then providing all kind
of a kaleidoscopic vision and of how you might conceive
of them. The structure is so excellent and really just

(01:00:04):
a masterclass of how short, very short, different fictional vignettes
can can create an incredible hole. So looking at this story,
the one that we're talking about here, August at the end,
with the Scandinavian summer coming to a close, is actually
a very good place for us also to bring this
lecture to a close. I want to make very brief mention.
I spoke earlier about the idea of looking at the

(01:00:27):
ephemerality of nature, but I think we've had a really
good look at some of the pros already and I
think it's really like, it's really like a kind of
a straightforward idea that anytime that we have these beautiful
descriptions of nature, and a lot of times it's the
fragile quality of nature, it's very easy to make that
jump from the fleeting nature of nature to the fleeting

(01:00:51):
nature of human life. So I don't think we need
to dive a whole lot deeper into that one thing
that I would have liked to have explored today, but
we're running out of time. Bit is the humor. This
book is so funny, but it's funny in a way.
It's not biting, but it's often very kind of sassy.
And what I love is the fact that this is
a book that is really tinged with a lot of

(01:01:12):
sadness and a lot of mourning. And I think actually
this lecture has sort of been disproportionately about the more
kind of poignant, more deeper aspects of the book, when
in reality there is so much lightness and brightness and
so much humor. This is a book that when I
recommend to people, and if you've read it now, I
hope that you have had this experience of it. People

(01:01:33):
love this book, which is in part because of the humor.
The humor adds enough levity and enough creative kind of
unexpected stuff that it doesn't feel too heavy. And I
love the fact that you know when people remember and
hopefully when you remember this book, there is a lightness
and a brightness and an optimism to it. And I
really I think that derives from this very smart use

(01:01:55):
of humor. It also, though, derives from a certain amount
of optimism. It just is inherent in all of these
different interactions between Grandmother and Sophia and the descriptions of nature.
It's just an absolutely gorgeous look at different phases of life.
So I want to just read the very last chunk

(01:02:16):
to really bring home how beautiful the proses but also
the really large questions that she's tackling and the beautiful
way that we do end up feeling optimistic. So on
page one point sixty nine, Grandmother sat down on the
chopping stump to wait for her balance. It came quickly,
but she stayed where she was. I mean, look at

(01:02:37):
that mastery. In the very beginning and the very first story,
she was losing her balance. She was someone who was
afraid of losing her balance. And here we have, at
the very end of the book and the end of
the summer, this idea of her balance coming quickly to her.
It's so gratifying. And we talk about structure. That is
a very subtle thing, but it is hugely important. So

(01:02:57):
she's waiting for her balance. It came quickly, but she
stayed where she was. The coastal freighter was heading out
to Kotka. The sound of its diesel motors gradually died,
and the night was as quiet as before. It smelled
of fall. I mean in the beginning, to remember, she
was worried about falling. Now it's fall. A new boat approached,

(01:03:18):
a small boat, probably running on gasoline. It might be
a herring boat with an automobile engine, but not this
late at night. They always went out right after sunset.
In any case, it wasn't in the channel, but heading
straight out to sea. It's slow thumping past the island,
and continued out farther and farther away, but never stopping.

(01:03:40):
Isn't that funny, grandmother said, It's only my heart. It's
not a herring boat at all. For a long time
she wondered if she should go back to bed or
stay where she was, she guessed she would stay for
a while. So lovely, I mean, just an absolutely gorgeous
close to an absolutely beautiful book. I realized that I
always use a lot of superlatives, like I just am

(01:04:01):
constantly saying things like I mean constantly and like absolutely
and incredibly. But I really think that speaks to just
like my passion for all of this stuff and how
deeply it moves me, and this book of like practically
all the books I've ever read, I just find it
so moving and so beautiful. And I really hope that
this deep dive today has given you more of an
appreciation for just what a Gemnas is and what an

(01:04:24):
extremely talented person Tove Jansone is. So thanks so much
for spending the time, Thank you for tuning in. Happy reading,