Sommarboken

I began reading Sommarboken (The Summer Book) by Tove Jansson in the original Swedish on my Kobo but found it quite hard going, and missed some of the enchantment that I could feel was present in the language. So I got an English copy, the translation by Thomas Teal, and reading the two versions together was a wonderful experience. It's become an annual ritual for many Swedes (and Swedish-speaking Finns) to read the book at the beginning of every summer, and I can see myself doing that too. 

The story of Sophia and her grandmother (farmor) is simple but wise. Point-of-view is beautifully handled, as we see things through a child’s eyes and then an adult’s; sometimes Sophia is the child and sometimes the Grandmother is. Summers pass by on their little island in the Finnish archipelago. The themes are the passing and return of the seasons, aging, endings and beginnings, memory, what is left at the end, the fragility of nature, the fragility of people... all the important things.

Ali Smith – whose recommendation in The Guardian set me off – has a blurb on the back cover of Teal’s translation that captures it perfectly:

[Jansson’s] writing is all magical deception, her sentences simple and loaded; the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth.

The character of Sophia is based on Jansson's niece of the same name, and I found a video of the real Sophia talking about the 50th anniversary edition. I love the accent of Swedish-speaking Finns. My old Stockholmare friend Fredrik used to admit that Swedish-Finns spoke the nicest Swedish and listening to this I think I'll have to get an audiobook version of Sommarboken.