Published by Random House / Sort Of Books, 1975, 160 pages

Tove Jansson is a Finnish writer best known for her children’s books about the Moomins. This is one of her few books for adults—a gentle, meditative narrative about the summers a little girl, Sophia, spends with her grandmother on a tiny, deserted island in the Gulf of Finland. It is fiction, but it doesn’t really feel like fiction. Jansson and her partner spent their summers on an island like the one she describes in the book, and the character Sophia was based on her niece. What this book does with gripping effectiveness is capture life on one of these Finnish islands, known for their many summer houses.

The book, written in 1972, paints a picture of what we would today call a summer of disconnect, of living in the moment—a time before cell phones and computers, before we were wired to react all the time to everything. “No-one came to visit and there was no mail. An orchid bloomed.”

The book begins as Sophia’s grandmother searches for her false teeth among the vegetation in front of their little house. It has rained all night and the “bare granite steamed, the moss and crevices were drenched with moisture, and all the colors everywhere had deepened”. Sophia’s mother is dead but the book is haunted by her absence. Her father is there but the book is really about the old woman and the little girl. And the island, which is a personality in its own right.

What struck me most is the protagonists’ seamless connection with the natural world, reflected in slow, rhythmic sentences and vivid descriptions. The family walks along paths in the “magic forest”.

“Only farmers and summer guests walk on the moss.” Moss is frail and if you step on it three times, it dies.

When I finished reading the book, I felt I had actually visited, experiencing the “warm, dark silence” of a Finnish summer night and listening to the “steady, chiding chatter” of long-tailed ducks. This book is still, a respite from a shrill, constantly changing world.

This review first appeared on Women on the Road. 

See also Zig-zagging around the world on Talking About Books.