Recently, my one-year-old son began the process of being weaned off breastfeeding. This is a natural transition, but no matter how clearly I explain that to him, he will not respond to reason. For the first week or so, he was constantly trying to nurse. What he missed, given his age, was not so much the sustenance, but the comfort of his mother.
This process has been toughest for him at night. Until now, whenever our child awoke at night and cried, he would be lulled back to sleep by the consoling presence of his mother and the soothing nourishment of warm milk. However, he now has to make do with his grizzled, groggy, and often grumpy father. Much as I want to support and love my son, sleep is a prized commodity, and I struggle to care for him throughout the night and get him back to sleep.
That being said, I have felt the need to get some kind of profit from these seemingly wasted hours. One way I have done this is by listening to an audiobook of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this novel deals with some of the same issues my son and I are currently facing together, and it has helped me to be more present to my son. But before reflecting further on that, it’s necessary to say something about this charming little book.
A girl, her grandmother, and a missing mother
Born in 1914, Tove Jansson was born to two artists who were part of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. She spent her own life pursuing artistic endeavors, becoming notable both for her writing and her work in the visual arts. Jansson is best-remembered for her books about the Moomins, hippopotamus-like creatures whose adventures have enthralled generations of children (and the adults who read them aloud). The picture-books and novels (the latter recently being given beautiful English-language collector’s editions) starring these creatures have been translated into dozens of languages. Less well-known, however, are her works for adults.
The Summer Book, or Sommarboken,focuses on the summertime adventures of, and conversations between, a young girl named Sophia and her grandmother. As the novel’s author did, the two spend their summers on an island in the gulf of Finland. Sophia’s father lives with them, but he is a very shadowy presence in the novel, taking little part in the two protagonists’ escapades and only being tangentially impacted by them.
The book has very little in terms of plot, instead functioning almost like a series of loosely connected short stories about the same two characters. Most chapters begin with a description of some facet of island life, or else with a question that Sophia poses to her grandmother. The girl is always seeking answers from her grandmother, with questions as simple as the name of an animal and as profound as the nature of God’s relationship to the world. In the first chapter, Sophia bluntly asks, “When are you going to die?” The elderly woman, seemingly disinterested, replies “Soon. But that is not the least concern of yours.”
This response is emblematic of the woman’s approach to conversations with her granddaughter. She is frank and does not sugarcoat things. In more ways than this, she is not a stereotypical grandmother. Yes, she loses her dentures and crabs about technology, but she also joins her granddaughter in rule-breaking, exploring the ravine into which the two are forbidden from going, and they even trespass on another person’s island and break into his home!
Sophia, who is six years old at the beginning of the novel, is a spirited girl. Though she is somewhat reserved around people outside the family, she is unreservedly herself with her grandmother. And since characters other than these two protagonists are barely seen in the novel, the reader quickly gets to know the child. Full of wonder and ready to adventure (within limits) with her grandmother, Sophia is a paragon of childhood wonder. This does not mean, however, that Jansson’s portrayal of the young girl is sentimentalized. Sophia gets sad and feels anger, and she can be judgmental and presumptuous. These flaws, though, humanize her rather than make her grating.
Crucially, Sophia is a girl who has lost her mother. This death is the invisible center of the novel, being explicitly mentioned only once but looming over every page of the book. Published a year after the death of the author’s own mother, The Summer Book is clearly helping the author to deal with her own grief. But this process involves, not discussion of the fictitious mother, but a focus on the living. The young girl is trying to process her mother’s death, while the grandmother is preparing for her own. Though the author was not quite elderly when writing the book, she was nearing her sixties. Thus, she had a natural sympathy with both the grieving daughter and the elderly woman.
It may seem strange that the mother’s absence is barely remarked upon, but it is characteristic of the way the grandmother communicates. She is not an effusive, or even particularly chatty, woman. She is elderly, with a body that is clearly in the irrevocable process of decline, and she has little interest in what she sees as idle chatter. Significantly, she sees almost anything to do with herself or emotions (hers or other people’s) as idle chatter. As a result, Sophia actually knows very little about her grandmother. She is shocked, for instance, when she discovers that her grandmother had a husband, and by extension, that she herself would have had a grandfather if he had lived. The grandmother, though, ends this conversation quickly. At one point, Sophia finds out that her grandmother was a very notable scout leader and asks about her experiences. Readers are given a window into the grandmother’s thoughts at this moment: “A very long time ago, grandmother had wanted to tell about all the things they did, but no one had bothered to ask, and now she had lost the urge.”
Despite the avoidance of emotional or explicitly personal topics, Sophia and her grandmother discuss things of great importance. Childhood, old age, and death are central to many conversations. They discuss how God hears prayers and whether Hell exists. When reading it, one does not have the impression of a heavy book, but at the same time, it is a book that confronts difficult parts of life. There is one chapter in particular that comes to mind here. Sophia learns about the city of Venice and decides to build a small version of it to play with. Her grandmother assists her along the way, but once they begin to play in the pretend city, Sophia insists that her grandmother pretends to be her mother. As the grandmother pushes back, Sophia becomes increasingly frustrated. The grandmother eventually explains that she is her father’s mother, not hers, and Sophia destroys the Venetian castle and shouts, “Why is he the only one who gets to say mama?”
The undercurrent of sorrow rarely swells up so visibly, though. The novel is filled with wonderful prose describing the island. The looming presence of death and pain is tempered by the vitality of the island and the main characters themselves. Thus, the novel has a lightness to it even as it engages with Sophia’s grief.
Interest and presence
I previously characterized the grandmother as being far from a picture book vision of the doting granny, and that is true. But that cannot be taken to mean that she does not love her granddaughter deeply. As her own internal voice puts it, “Nice, she thought. No. I’m certainly not nice. The best you could say of me is that I’m interested.”
This “interest” is the main way that the grandmother incarnates her love for the little girl. Despite her gruffness and even terseness, the pages are filled with her taking genuine interest in her granddaughter’s questions and pastimes. Their conversations display a rare intimacy, even as they eschew ‘touchy-feely’ subjects.
The grandmother’s “interest” could be characterized another way: as presence. She is the only person who is consistently present to the young girl. Sophia’s mother is absent because of her death. Strikingly, though, the father, who is physically present on the island, is similarly distant. Sophia comments at one point that she likes knowing her father is there, even though he spends so little time with her. The reader is given the impression that her father is managing his grief by throwing himself into his work. This is, of course, understandable, given the pain he is undergoing, but he seems to give little thought to his daughter’s pain.
Despite its apparent simplicity, being present to loved ones can be quite difficult—Sophia’s father shows us that. Whether because of our pain, our busy-ness, our jobs, or even our smart phones, it is often far easier to be absent from the lives of our loved ones. This is a perennial temptation, but it is one that is particularly acute today.
Thus, I return to my own situation: dealing with my son’s difficulty in sleeping. In the middle of the night, there is nothing I would rather be doing than sleeping. If I must be awake, I would like to be doing something immediately profitable. As I indicated earlier, I can easily think of time with him crying—or even sleeping—in my arms as somehow wasted. I am not getting my work done. I am not cleaning our messy kitchen. I am often not even listening to an audiobook. I am just there, holding a tired, and sometimes screaming, lunk.
However, that lunk is my child, a child who is asking for my love and presence. I often look forward to the days when he and I can discuss nature, books, and films, tell jokes, and simply chat, but that day is not today. What is needed now is not my intellect. It is not my sense of humor. It is not even my ability to converse. Instead, it is my simple presence, holding my crying or sleeping baby.
In a time when human life is so commodified by economic factors, data mining, and political division, this serves as a reminder to me that the human person is far more than a number. There is a radiance to the human person, whether that person be a crying baby boy, a grieving six-year-old girl, or an old woman preparing to meet her Maker. Being aware of this radiance often requires one of the last things we feel we have energy for: simple presence and interest. Literature does many things: it entertains, it takes readers to faraway lands, it provides opportunities for moral instruction. But one crucial function of literature in general and The Summer Book in particular is this: it helps us to be more aware of the radiance of the human person, encouraging us to be present for that radiance. The beauty of the human person is not always easy to see, but it is well worth looking for.
