Play Book Tag discussion

An orchid bloomed.
Everything was fine, and yet everything was overshadowed by a great sadness.

This is a book that was born out of a terrible loss. Tove Jansson wrote The Summer Book in 1972, the year after her own mother died. The author turns instinctively to her best memories of their life together: the summers the family spent each year on a small island in the Gulf of Finland. The beauty of the sea and the sky, the closeness to the miracle of life that clings precariously to the granite rock of the island is balanced by the recklessness of the elements and the carelessness of insensitive visitors.

The Summer Book has never been out of print in Scandinavia. Its allure is the allure of summer itself for these people who spend so much of the year in the dark.

The whole book is an interplay of light and darkness, of laughter and tears, of exuberant joy and painful regrets, at the same time fragile and resilient, like the delicate moss that covers the boulders on the tiny island. So tread softly, because beauty and love are so easy to trample underfoot.

“Only farmers and summer guests walk on the moss ... The second time it doesn’t rise back up. And the third time you step on moss, it dies. Eider ducks are the same way – the third time you frighten them up from their nests, they never come back.”

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The novelist Ali Smith, in describing why and how she loves this story, expressed much better what I was trying to convey earlier: this is not a book to be dissected, analysed and explained with a critical pen.

... the writing so lightly kept, so simple-seeming, so closely concerned with the weighing of moments that any extra weight of exegesis is too much."

I couldn't follow the advice of Ali Smith myself, so I wrote a long and rambling review to try and capture in words the quiet magic of Tove Jansson's summer memories. Just ignore my comments, and give this unique book a chance

Great review, Algernon. I am adding it.

This was the best fit for me in this month's tag. It really is a book about summer, that special summer feeling we remember all our lives.
I think it will make the top 10 of 2025 for me.

Wow, that is high praise. I hope to get to it "soonish."