The Summer Book

The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson, belongs to the genre of literary fiction where characters work through grief. Usually, the loss is barely mentioned, as it is here. Usually, the characters behave strangely and sometimes destructively, often unable to articulate their sense of dislocation. The Catcher in the Rye is a good example of this genre. In Jansson's novel, a small girl and her grandmother deal with the loss of the girl's mother on an island in the Sea of Finland. The girl's father is present but ghostly, given almost no space on the page and often preoccupied with some kind of "work." So in their own way, the two generations-spanning women forge a unique sense of family and understanding, all against a spectacular natural backdrop. 

The Summer Book is written in a skein of small vignettes. Often hypnotic and preoccupied with natural things, like birds and seaweed, the novel drifts through the title season, making the landscape its protagonist. Minor characters, when they emerge every two chapters or so, don't feel real, as if they were under water or out in a deep fog. What's interesting is the book's persistence on strange metaphors, like an excellent late meditation, by the small girl, on earthworms separating and still living. This is as close as the reader gets to a clear theme, the sense that emotionally shattered people will fixate on the minutiae at the edge of perception, hoping to find truth.