John and Rosianna discuss The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. This episode was originally released to subscribers in November 2019.
The Summer Book is a small, calm book of vignettes that makes one feel as if they are reading through memories unstuck in time. In this episode, John Green and Rosianna Halse Rojas discuss the physical setting of the island, the sneaky humor of characters like Grandma and Sophia, and the themes of grief and fear as they are interwoven throughout the book.
This episode was originally released to subscribers in November 2019. The Life’s Library Discord and subscriptions are now closed after a wonderful three years of reading together. Check out past books at www.lifeslibrarybookclub.com, Twitter, and Instagram.
Life’s Library logo by Bethany Mannion.
John Green: Hello and welcome to the Life's Library podcast. I'm here with my co-host Rosianna Halse Rojas. We were just reading The Summer Book by Tove Jansson.
Rosianna Halse Rojas: I want to say Jansson but that might be me inventing—
John: It's probably like Tove Jansson.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: That's my prediction.
Rosianna: We were never going to crush that one.
John: No, it's not my specialty what I was about to tell you before we started recording—Rosianna and I were talking about how we would love to see a movie adaptation of this book, even though, you know, of course, very little would happen. But on the other hand it would be cheap to make because it all just takes place on the one island.
Rosianna: You just got to find the right island and that's—you just go for it.
John: Yeah. There's a few special effects issues, like when the dad tries to bring in all of the fresh water and the dirt to terraform the island and it goes disastrously, but anyway. On the one hand, obviously, this would be a terrible movie and nobody would watch it because nothing happens and it doesn't star any, you know, 42-year-old movie stars. But on the other hand, maybe this is what the world needs right now. Just some calm, Finnish, island, life-is-okay kind of stuff.
Rosianna: Yeah. Let's sit and explore big themes of life while being calm on an island. The biggest problem is there's a storm.
John: Yes.
Rosianna: And Venice is gone, like that—also, I feel like you could cast a rugged movie star as the dad and then get someone like, I don't know, like a Helen Mirren for the grandmother.
John: Oh, that's a great idea. Helen Mirren and maybe like a—is Tom Cruise busy? I think he'd crush it. He can probably do a good Swedish accent.
Rosianna: He could do the water stunts.
John: Yeah. Yeah, oh, he would do his own stunts for sure. But I loved this book and it did seem to me like a wonderful antidote to the world as I'm living it. It seemed to be able to speak to me about this world in ways that surprised me. So I wonder if we could maybe start by just you talking about why you picked it and what you feel like some of the initial reaction has been from our community.
Rosianna: Yeah, so I actually—this book, I first read this summer. My friend's boyfriend recommended it to me and it was quite funny because I associate him with reading really, really long books.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: And I associate Tove Jansson with the Moomins—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —which I never grew up watching or reading myself, but I know have such a big—there's such a big cultural presence in so many people's lives, but just not in mine. So I'd been aware of it way before that and the bookshop that I grew up working in and grew up going to, which sadly is no longer open. My manager always made sure that we had The Summer Book in stock because he really loved it too. So when my friend's boyfriend recommended this to me, I thought actually, it's about time that I read it. And I read it and I read it in like one afternoon and absolutely loved it and then read it all again the next day. And I think that it's a strange little book in that the narrative is both chronological and not, and it kind of leaves it up to you to decide when and where and how and who this will happens to in a lot of ways. It just tells you things. And something that I really like about the discussion I've been seeing on the Discord is that several people have said that it makes them feel like they are reading through memories—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —because they have that vignette feeling to them.
John: Right. I loved the vignette-y-ness of it. And I also—it feels unstuck in time—
Rosianna: Yes.
John: —in some ways where it's summer. That's still kind of the one thing we know about The Summer Book—about each vignette—is that they take place during summer when this is where they live and—but other than that, it feels very much like it doesn't rely upon building tension or narrative stakes in the ways that a typical novel would.
Rosianna: Yeah, and in fact it kind of denies you some of that. Like, it asks you—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —I mean, we know that Sophia's mother is dead, but we don't ever find out exactly what happened to her.
John: Right.
Rosianna: But you have to—the thing that I really like about it is that, well, one of the many things I really like about, is the focus on attention.
John: Mhm.
Rosianna: So you see the grandmother paying all this attention and also Sophia, too. And that's kind of how I feel reading the book is every time I reread it, I noticed different things. But to do so, I have to get into what I feel like is a specific mindset of being on that island and looking at things differently and looking at what's there on the ground and how to interact with it, how to honor it. The whole reading experience feels captured on the physical island itself.
John: Yeah, and it's very much a story about the relationship between people and the spaces they inhabit and how we terraform those spaces, both literally and figuratively, but also they kind of terraform us. Like, they shape us. One of my—I love the way that people who are trained in art and who become writers, write about art. It's like one of my favorite things in fiction. Like Rachel Kushner's novels about art or when Richard Powers writes about art. And in this book, you can tell that the author definitely knows a lot of art history from the way that she describes the grandmother's wood sculptures—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —that she denies are sculptures and the way that she lets the wood decide the form of the animal that she's making is—struck me as just such a wonderful, clear metaphor for the ideal relationship between the island and its human inhabitants. But how difficult it is to hold on to that balance.
Rosianna: Yeah, I really love that. And Tove Jansson was an artist as well as a writer. And I think that's—there is some interview where she talks about how that that's kind of how she defined herself more than anything was as an artist and as a painter, I believe, or as a drawer. And that really comes through, yeah. That really comes through in the grammar that you have this feeling that art is just interwoven into their lives in a really meaningful, day-to-day kind of way. But also, as you say, in the descriptions of how she interacts with objects and looks at them and sees their potential and also how she just gets started making things before even announcing that she's making something.
John: Right. I love that. Yeah, and I also love that a lot of times, like she doesn't take the things that she makes out of their space.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And I think at one point...at one point, the little girl, Sophia, asks, is this an art exhibition? And grandmother's like, no, no, no, no, no. This is just a forest with some art in it. Which is another thing—like this book is so sneaky funny.
Rosianna: Yeah, it's really cheeky.
John: It's got a very specifically Scandinavian sense of humor to me.
Rosianna: Yeah. It feels really naughty in places, like naughty and rude and wonderfully sarcastic. I always felt that when reading books about grandmothers, I always felt authors wrote them wrong because I could never see either of my grandmothers in—
John: Mm.
Rosianna: —like the sweet, soft, cushy, "we'll bring you cookies" kind of people. Because they just weren't. Both of my grandmothers were not like that at all. My grandmothers are much more like the one in The Summer Book: have a lot of edge and will kind of—will say what they want and have their own opinions and very strong-minded. And I think a lot of the humor in the book comes through the lens of the grandmother.
John: Yeah, in a way both she and Sophia have been liberated by age, but in different ways. Like they're both such interesting foils for the father character because the grandmother is so sarcastic. And she clearly—I think it's right at the beginning that Sophia asks, will you die soon? And she says, yes, soon. And then they're like, will they dig a hole? And the grandma says, yes, a big hole. Big enough for all of us. Like, it's—like the way that she understands Sophia's vivid imaginatory world. Like her—you know, like the dad clearly doesn't.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: And she's able to engage with it in a way that's not—like it's so unafraid. I would love to be able to engage with my children's imagination that way, but I worry that I would—I worried that I would traumatize them. But of course, what really causes the pain and the disconnection in the end is having people tiptoe around you and Grandmother never tiptoes around Sophia. And I think that makes such a huge difference because that's the love that she needs.
Rosianna: Yes, I think that's absolutely right. I think it's also kind of a function of a grandmother role in your life because you don't—you know, I know in this case she's helping to care for Sophia, but she's not the primary carer in a lot of other ways. So she gets to be this figure that—can share her wisdom and can challenge her and speak to her directly and answer her questions honestly. I love that interchange about God and the devil and hell—
John: Oh, yeah.
Rosianna: —and how angry Sophia gets.
John: Yeah. Oh.
Rosianna: I love that. It feels so true, as well. Yeah.
John: Yeah, it felt—it was one of those books that felt extremely real to me. Like I could see the characters—I don't have a very visual imagination, so I don't usually see a story, but I could see so much of that island, especially because the physical place is described so lovingly. Like a lot of times I get tired of super detailed descriptions of places. Like I vividly remember in high school reading this three-page description of a tree in Ethan Frome, and just being like, I'm out, I'm done.
Rosianna: [laughs]
John: Not participating in this anymore. But in this story, I just—and maybe it's because I have a great bias for islands, but I just loved the way that they wrote about the moss. I loved the way they wrote about the forest and how you have to be there for a long time. It's the visitors to the place who don't understand the rules of living there, who are the ones who step on the moss, who kill the moss. But, you know, you build a sense of harmony with the place over a long period of time. And that made me think about my own—where I live now, because I do live kind of in the woods and the sense of, you know, the sense of connection that I have to all those trees and to the paths that I've built and kind of carved out of the wilderness and everything. And, I don't know, it just really resonated with me. I do think that younger me probably wouldn't have liked this book as much as a 42-year-old me did, but oh, I just loved it.
Rosianna: Oh, I'm so glad. Yeah, I—one thing I find really funny is that when I first read it, I pictured the island as absolutely massive.
John: Mm.
Rosianna: That there were all these places to go to. And then when I reread it, and also when I started to look at pictures of the islands that Tove lived on—there was one she lived on with her husband and then later with her partner. They're very small.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: They're tiny little islands.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: They're kind of just like, how was this magically built on collections of rocks—what it looks like to me, with my big city eyes.
John: Right.
Rosianna: Kind of like, how do you survive that? But it's wonderful, that feeling of that world. And also, I mean, I grew up loving books about islands so much. Like that's such a big part of my—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —childhood.
John: Well, I mean, there is a romance to an island, right, which is that you are removed from the rest of the world quite literally.
Rosianna: Yeah. And that's such a fun place to set stories. Yeah, when I was reading this, I kept remembering this book I read when I was a kid—that was probably my favorite book when I was a child and it was called, The Island. And it was by Gary Paulsen, the guy who wrote Hatchet. Have you ever read Hatchet?
Rosianna: Yes.
John: So the guy who wrote Hatchet wrote this book called The Island, which I have not reread since I was, you know, twelve or something. So I've no idea if it's good. If it's terrible, I apologize. But what I loved about it was that it was about this boy—what I recall of it, anyway—is this boy would row out to an island in a lake and it was just his place. His spot. And that feeling of your space, your spot, having a place that's really yours is so hard to come by when you're a kid especially, I think. And you feel that for Sophia, that this is her place, deeply, you know, and that home is almost a—sort of a person. But it also reminded me of this great book I read, that I'm sure I've talked to you about before, called An Island to Oneself, about this guy who lived for 25 years alone on a deserted island.
Rosianna: Yes, you have told me about this.
John: Oh god, I just—I love that book. I mean, the guy—obviously troubled, right? Like no—takes a certain kind of vibe. But I just love it. I just—yeah, it's a way of removing yourself from the rest of—you know, all the inputs, all the constant stimulation, both social and virtual that we have. I found myself thinking like, could I do it? Could I live on a tiny island in Sweden? I did once spend three nights on a tiny island in Sweden on a trip with my wife and a couple of friends, and we lived on a sailboat for a week. And then we were able to live on an island for three days. And living on that island felt like such luxury after the extremely cramped quarters of the boat. But I don't think I could do it.
Rosianna: Even all summer?
John: I found myself thinking, well, could I live without internet? I guess I could make my videos and then have a courier come and pick up the SD card.
Rosianna: Oh, 2019.
John: I have someone on the mainland upload every Tuesday, but I—you know, I don't think I could do it. I think that, you know, I'm romanticizing it in the end, but what a wonderful place to romanticize.
Rosianna: I loved what you said about being on the island by themselves, because it made me think about the fact that in those stories—the big one I think about was the Famous Five books by Enid Blyton.
John: Right, yeah, I know you love those.
Rosianna: Yeah, well, I really did as a kid and I haven't really gone back to them as much as an adult because...I don't know, they're outdated in lots of ways—is the generous way to put it.
John: Oh, yeah, sure.
Rosianna: But I have such a strong love for them that yeah, I remember them very fondly. But in so many of those stories, it's children in these isolated places by themselves or with other people their age and that serves a big literary function of taking the adults away and letting them do—
John: Right.
Rosianna: —whatever it is kids want to do.
John: Right.
Rosianna: But in this case, she's on the island with her grandmother and with her father. And that just made me think about the fact that what holds them together and also keeps them separate from everyone else is that they've just lost—she's just lost her mother. So this kind of isolation to it.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And I was just thinking about how lovely a metaphor that is for that complete isolation, but then also being with other people who have different interactions to it.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And all the different generations of that.
John: Right, that reminds me of something Cheryl Strayed said on the podcast Dear Sugars once, I think, which I thought was just so wise. It was—someone had written in to say that someone close to them had died and they just didn't know how to live in the regular world. And what Cheryl Strayed pointed out is that when someone you love dies, you are living on planet My Best Friend Just Died or My Mother Just Died and everyone else is living on planet Earth. And it's very confusing why everyone is living on planet Earth. And it's also confusing to other people why you are living on planet My Mother Just Died, especially if they've never visited that planet. And so the island—in a lot of ways, I mean, this is so much a book about grief but in ways that—it touches on it. It's almost like trying to describe the elephant, you know—
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: —blindfolded, where you touch lots of different parts of the big, big, big problem of grief. But I think one of the ways that she gets at that is by exploring how it does put you on an island. To be the person whose mother has died or whose spouse has died. And so I think it really does put you on an island and that's part of what I found so fascinating about the vignette where the friend comes.
Rosianna: Yes. Berenice.
John: The friend comes and it just doesn't work.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: It doesn't work for anybody because she doesn't live on this island. She's not from here. She's not going through this. Her problems are stupid.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Like she's scared of her hair getting tangled because of the saltwater.
Rosianna: I love the frustration with it, as well. She's like, why is she—she's scared of ants, like come on.
John: It's so true to six year olds, too.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Yeah, Alice is like that. She'll just be completely baffled by other kids' fears, but then she has her own.
Rosianna: Yeah. Yeah, and Sophia is full of her own fears, but she just cannot comprehend Berenice's.
John: Oh, of course.
Rosianna: I really—one of my favorite parts of the book is where they talk about the different drawings that the girls do and Sophia's get—they escalate in their anger until she throws a shipwreck, and then she's over it.
John: Yes.
Rosianna: And then Berenice has drawn this horrifying picture of this black hole and these bats, I think, or something, bats for arms.
John: Right, and Berenice's drawing is really, really good. And the grandmother is clearly quite impressed with it. And then Sophia is kind of feeling defensive and gloomy and she says, can she draw? And grandmother says, nah, probably not. She's probably one of those people who do one good thing and then that's the end of it. Like it's so—[laughs]
Rosianna: [laughs] Which—some people in the Discord were saying that they thought that that was quite mean of her.
John: Oh no, I thought that was hilarious.
Rosianna: And I thought—it's just brilliant.
John: For me it was both very funny and also very true. That's—to me, that's so the perspective of an artist who's seen a lot of other artists. Because like this—so often you'll go to a show or something and you'll just be like, oh my god, that's incredible. That's—I've never seen anything like that. And then you'll see the rest of the artist's work and you'll be like, yeah, all right, well. Some people do one good thing and that's the end of it.
Rosianna: Well, for me, it also showed the moments where Grandmother is actually quite sweet, even though she's being quite sarcastic. Like she knows it's important to Sophia to be the best at art, or that art is kind of her thing or their thing together. So I also felt like it was a moment of her being generous to her after they'd been apart for most of the day.
John: Right, exactly. Yeah, it's a way of reassuring her granddaughter that even though this is an amazing drawing that her friend made, that doesn't mean that she's not great.
Rosianna: Yeah.
John: Sophia's not great.
Rosianna: She's not been #replaced.
John: Right. Totally.
Rosianna: Also, just on the grief note again, quickly, another chapter I loved was the chapter with the cat or the two cats, I should say. I can't remember what the naughty cat is. I've kind of been thinking about it as Wild Cat and Fluffy. But I really loved how furious Sophia was with the cat. I particularly liked when she screams when the cat brings in—oh, Moppy's the cat. When Moppy brings in the birds and she screams because that to me really felt like she's being forced to interact with this grief and forced to confront death.
John: Yes.
Rosianna: And then she chooses this very soft, fluffy, behaves exactly as you'd imagine a cat would want to alternative and then she realizes that that doesn't give her what being close to this creature that brought death close to her gives her.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: I just really—I really, really loved that chapter or story or vignette or however, John: Yeah, I loved that one too. And it circled back to, I think, the earlier chapter where they're finding bones and then they're putting bones in the forest and they find a skull and they put the skull in the forest and the light—it's sunset and the light is so beautiful. And then Sophia looks at it and I think she screams and she says get it away.
Rosianna: Yes.
John: All of that seemed very real to me about how children experience grief, where you're trying to process something, you're letting yourself get close to it, and then you get to a certain level of closeness and it's really, really scary.
Rosianna: Yes, and that also kind of calls to mind the amazing use of color in it, as well.
John: Oh, yeah.
Rosianna: Because there's that—the scarlet sunsets and the—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna —you just really see it.
John: Oh, the weather in this book is phenomenal.
Rosianna: Very good weather.
John: That's the great thing about all Scandinavian fiction—I don't want to generalize—a lot of Scandinavian fiction has awesome weather. Like Henning Mankell's detective novels with Kurt Wallander? Oh, the weather. Amazing! I mean the detective parts are good, but the weather parts are just phenomenal.
Rosianna: I need to get into that. It feels like the right time of year to get into the gloomy Scandinavian books.
John: Yes, they are like winter, cozy up, and just read about some Swedish serial killing.
Rosianna: Lovely. It's perfect. Well, I usually—this is Agatha Christie season for me, so I'll go Scandinavian.
John: Oh! That's nice.
Rosianna: Yeah, well, you know, when it gets dark at 4 p.m., so...
John: I mean, if you're lucky. I've been to some 3 p.m. soccer matches in winter that are under the lights.
Rosianna: Yep. Well, it's only the 14th of November. So it's coming.
John: That's true. It's going to get worse. I was saying that to Sarah this morning, as I was cleaning snow off the car. I was saying, I'm going to feel like this for five months.
Rosianna: Yeah. It's not quite that bad.
John: Oh, it's just brutal.
Rosianna: It's a lot.
John: So before we go, we have important business to attend to.
Rosianna: We do. Yes, we have—so many of you took part in a hunt on the Discord. I think this was during Yiddish Policemen's Union and we have the winners to read out.
John: Maybe you have them. I don't actually have them right now. Do you know where they are?
Rosianna: I have the winners to read out.
John: Well, I want to read some of them. I don't know where they are, though.
Rosianna: I'll share it with you, John.
John: Are they inside the massive Google Docs? Oh, there it is. Thank you, Rosianna. All right, here we go. I'm going to read the first ten.
Rosianna: Okay.
John: DiscoveringIce, skulblaka, D.G.Cole. Y'all have some very challenging usernames. Tagrantelli, Lullering, Lullering? Oh, come on, Gabi. Viskusteinninn-nin-nin-nin. OnyxxDragon, klazu, threeplusfive, and Salixa.
Rosianna: And MassivePizzaCrust, Mia, Alexis ghost, Maria, squirrel—
John: I think it's Alexis_goose.
Rosianna: Oh. [laughs] Sorry. Horrible goose. Maria, squirrel80, scattie_t, Krissy, Cameil, micimacko? Micimacko? Majowa.
John: Then we've also got sania, Cro, Chels603, joymoose, Just.As.Sane, beckicw, Nyn, Zara, Rachel, Andraste? And Kathi.
Rosianna: And then we have ladypontisbright, inaudiblemelodies, noucki, Malia, Sparklepuff3000, ChrisThrashr, helen, stephanieasrn, Lunanne, Yxaj. I don't think that's pronounceable.
John: Yxach?
Rosianna: Yxach? Maybe.
John: Yxaj.
Rosianna: I like that.
John: That's good. In general, I would just like to say that I think what people are going to enjoy most is the pleasure of hearing us mispronounce their usernames.
Rosianna: Definitely.
John: Also completing the Life's Library scavenger hunt in the first sixty were DrNoble, 95% Cocoa, irishlluv, Pippi, Shpitz, Treacheroussheep, which—all sheep are—Chelsea, zonojo, Emily, Melissa Bee, Rachel C, Alicia, mfluder14, adelweisz?
Rosianna: Adelweisz?
John: I think—adelweisz! That makes much more sense. Kindlewick, Joy, Read247247—
Rosianna: [laughs]
John: —and al—either Allie Sasa or Alice Asa.
Rosianna: I was thinking Alysasuh.
John: Alysasuh! That makes so much more sense. This reminds me of when I was—and by the way, by now nobody's listening to the podcast, so it's just us now, Rosianna. But this reminds me of when I—in my younger and more vulnerable years, what I was like on CompuServe and AOL Instant Messenger and a teenager and everything. And I would, you know, like I would be real friends with people's usernames, but I would be mispronouncing their usernames for years, you know? And then seven years into knowing someone, I would be like, oh, it's Alyssa! Of course! That makes sense. And then you got to retrain your brain. Also, lots of other people finished the scavenger hunt. I'm sorry that we can't read all your name. But I do want to say to the people who finished 61st and 62nd, who were Larissa and JenLovesBugs, and everybody who participated in the scavenger hunt. Thank you so much. It was not easy. I took a gander at it myself and was like, whoa, this is way above my pay grade.
Rosianna: And I also want to thank the planning team and that's Alys, Diana, Haley Mae, Erin, Jonathan, and other Jonathan, and Mels. Thank you to everyone for doing that.
John: Yeah. Thanks so much. Thanks for being part of Life's Library with us. We're really excited about year two. We hope you are as well. If you haven't signed up, you can do so at lifeslibrarybookclub.com. Signups are closing fairly soon, so sign up now. We've got an audiobook option, still great digital subscription options, and of course you can get a real nice physical book that you can page through. Like this one.
Rosianna: Can I add a little—I just remembered one thing that I wanted to say that was another—of my many favorite parts of this book.
John: Yeah, of course.
Rosianna: Just to bring it back around at the end.
John: Sure.
Rosianna: There's a—the very final chapter. I really like that it focuses on Grandmother. I think it's called August, the chapter, and there's a bit where she's looking around the guest room and getting ready to leave the island. And the guest room is getting full—filled with stuff as they prepare the place to shut it up for the winter. And she asks, how can I ever leave this room? And then later she goes outside and she says, she thought that she would stay awhile. And I really loved that because it felt like when I was reading it, like she was talking about both herself being alive and then also observing life and kind of being a witness to life.
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: And that was just something that I found so moving when I read it.
John: Yeah, me too. I thought that was lovely. Thanks for bringing it back to the book.
Rosianna: Well, you know, after we mispronounced all those names—
John: Yeah.
Rosianna: —I felt like we redeem ourselves in some way.
John: Yeah, indeed. Well, thank y'all for listening. Thanks for being here with us. And we look forward to reading more books with you.
Rosianna: I'm very excited. Thank you.
John: Bye.