I may be in a small minority of BoingBoing readers for whom this is both and newsworthy and exciting.
I don’t think I could hold her The Summer Book in higher regard. I found it by accident, bought it on a whim wondering what the author of Moomin would have to say to adults.
Oh happy impulse! Sometimes you win the lottery.
Its language is direct, it is plain spoken and in no way fussy, and it is structured in highly-digestible somewhat autonomous chapters. Yet is pervaded by a preternatural lyricism, quietude, and profound beauty.
The only work I can think of to compare it to is Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill, though they share only some notes in the chord.
Superficially The Summer Book is a simple, quiet, almost plotless account of a summer (more than one? It’s a bit ambiguous) spent on an island by a young girl (7 perhaps), her grandmother, and the girl’s all but invisible and absent father.
But the beneath the surface it skirts magic realism and the whole quietly revolves around the question of death and mortality, without ever being morbid or even melancholy. The center of the book is the girl’s absent mother, who is mentioned at most a couple of times, so much in passing that the secret of the whole book – that she has just died, and in their various ways each family member is coming to terms with that – could easily be missed.
The long light of Scandanavian summer, the humor, the poetry of things and life, and sudden incisive insights of each character into the others… all of these make the book about life as the answer to those questions.
So very very good and so unique. Quiet, slight, fragile – I’m still in its thrall…
