57 pages • 1 hour read
Tove JanssonThe Summer Book
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Vignettes
A vignette is a small scene which can appear in the form of a passage, essay, or other short work of fiction or nonfiction. They are impressionistic scenes, meaning they are intended to portray an impression about a mood, an idea, a character, a setting, or an aspect. Vignettes are not written using a traditional plot structure—a typical sequence of context, conflict, rising action, climax, resolution. Rather, they are short descriptions or scenes that can stand alone or contribute to a larger body of text. Vignettes serve to enhance artistic effect, and they are often rife with literary devices such as imagery, sensory language, symbolism, and analogy. As they use vivid descriptions to provide close examinations of small features—setting, characters, ideas—they are both efficient and evocative.
The Summer Book consists of a series of vignettes. Each of the 22 sections of the book include impressionistic scenes that efficiently describe the settings, characters, and ideas within the novel. Although each vignette in the book can be read and appreciated as an individual description, they are linked through the characters, settings, and themes. However, the form of the text also allows the author to deviate from the primary themes, such as in “The Road,” where she briefly transitions into the theme of human-caused environmental destruction. The author uses an abundance of literary devices—notably symbols, motifs, sensory language, imagery, setting—to develop the individual scenes with the primary intentions of characterizing Grandmother and Sophia and of helping the reader to envision the elaborately described settings.
Authorial Context: Tove Jansson
Tove Jansson, the author of The Summer Book, lived from 1914-2001. Her father, Viktor, was Finnish and her mother, Signe, was Swedish. Both Viktor and Signe worked in creative fields—Viktor was a sculptor, and Signe was an artist and illustrator. Jansson followed in her parents’ footsteps, becoming both a visual artist and the most widely read Finnish author internationally. While Jansson’s art, comics, short stories, and books have received much recognition, she is best known for the Moomin series, which ran from 1945 until1993 and consisted of books and comic strips.
Multiple autobiographical elements are incorporated into The Summer Book. Grandmother has a strong appreciation for art, and she is a sculptor. She has a sculpture that she keeps in the cottage, and she carves buildings and abstract animals out of the driftwood she finds. Grandmother’s proclivity for art reflects that of Jansson and her family.
A second autobiographical element is depicted through the book’s setting. Like Sophia’s family, Jansson spent her summers in the Gulf of Finland on the islands of the Stockholm archipelago. Later, she and her partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, built their own summer house on Klovharu, an island in the Pellinki archipelago in the Gulf of Finland. Jansson used her experiences living and exploring the islands in the Gulf of Finland to develop intricately described settings. Her intimate knowledge of the environments on the islands, combined with her skill using literary devices such as sensory language and imagery, results in detailed descriptions of numerous settings.
