The end of summer: The Summer Book

Sophia (Emily Matthews) and her grandmother (Glenn Close) in The Summer Book (2024). Image source: ToveJansson.com

The Summer Book is a film adaptation of the elegiac 1972 novel of the same title by the Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson (pronounced something like TU-veh YAN-son); the novel's highly-praised English translation by Thomas Teal has been reprinted in the U.S. by New York Review Books.

Cover of the U.S. reprint of The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. Image source: New York Review Books

Jansson is perhaps best known for her Moominland books, which are considered children's classics. But like all the best children's literature, they can be read with pleasure by, and have some implicit messages for, adults as well.

Cover of A Treasury of Moomin Tales, "Adapted from three classic stories by Tove Jansson." Image source: Bookshop.org

The Summer Book is one of five novels and five collections of short stories that Jansson wrote for older readers. It's about Sophia, a six-year-old girl who spends the summer after the death of her mother in a cabin on a small island in the Gulf of Finland with her father and elderly grandmother. As the season blossoms and wanes, the grandmother guides Sophia to an appreciation of the natural world that surrounds them, and helps her come to terms with the inevitability of change and loss.

Jansson herself spent almost every summer in an island cabin, as a child with her family and as an adult joined by her life partner, the artist and teacher Tuulikki Pietilä, whom she met in 1955.

Tuulikki Pietilä with Tove Jansson and Tove's mother Signe Hammarsten Jansson on the island of Klovharun, circa 1960s. Image source: ToveJansson.com

Affectionately known as "Tooti," Pietilä was the model for the Moomin character Too-ticky, always pictured in a striped sweater and beret.

Cover of Moominland Midwinter (1957) by Tove Jansson. Image source: Eustea Reads: A Life in Books and Tea

In The Summer Book the character of Sophia was based on Jansson's niece Sophia, who was six during the summer of 1968, while the grandmother was based on Jansson's mother Signe Hammarsten Jansson (known as "Ham"), also an artist, who was 86 in 1968.

Sophia Jansson's grandmother Signe Hammarsten-Jansson in the 1960s. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

The father is based on Sophia's father and Tove's brother Lars Jansson, who was also an artist and a writer. Sophia's mother Nita passed away when she was young, and, according to the webpage for Sophia's autobiography Three Islands: Father, Mother and Me, her father offered "security and care" but also "an unwavering silence." The actor portraying Lars in The Summer Book, Anders Danielsen Lie, bears a strong resemblance to the photograph of Sophia's father on the cover of Three Islands. That photograph may have been taken during the very summer fictionalized in The Summer Book.

Cover of Tre Öar (Three Islands) by Sophia Jansson, Förlaget, 2025. Image source: Rights & Brands

Screenwriter Robert Jones' adaptation of The Summer Book is a quiet film in which a series of small events and the rhythm of the tides and the weather accumulate emotional weight. The grandmother takes Sophia to her favorite place on the island, the moss-covered Magic Forest; they plant herbs and flowers and watch them grow; the ferryman, Eriksson, arrives with a box of fireworks for Midsommar which includes a surprise gift for Sophia; Sophia and her grandmother discover that a new, wealthier family has erected a prefabricated cottage on a nearby island, and in defiance of a "No Trespassing" sign make themselves at home on their deck.

The film was directed by Charlie MacDowell, and the starkly beautiful land- and water-scapes were shot on 16mm film by cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen using natural light. Grøvlen's photography is striking; my partner compared the opening scenes of the island in winter to the work of the artist Andy Goldsworthy.

Some of the film's symbolism is perhaps a touch too apparent, and there are both small and significant differences between the film and the book. To take one example, in the book the rich neighbors, a businessman and his family, are unpleasant; in the film, when they discover the grandmother and Sophia on their property, they invite them into the house and offer them cake.

But the performances, particularly of Glenn Close as the grandmother and Finnish actress Emily Matthews as Sophia, are very honest and brave. Close fully inhabits her role as a weathered and wise elder who smokes, drinks, and wanders naked in the woods, while Matthews is all too convincing as a girl who is just another summer or two from young womanhood, but who remains a watchful (and sometimes annoying and willful) child. Anders Danielsen Lie is memorable in the scenes in which he's featured, but for long stretches of the film the father is absent, withdrawn into his own grief.

The Summer Book is meditative and melancholy, and the end of summer is the perfect time to watch. Check your local public library's streaming services. The website ToveJansson.com, the source of many of the images in this post, is a treasure-trove of information about Jansson's life and work. Particularly revelatory for me were the pages Work Fuelled by Desire, about Jansson's courageous determination to break her engagement to a man and live the truth of her love for women at a time when homosexuality was officially illegal, and Island for the Solitary and Free, about the importance of the Pellinge islands to Jansson and the origins of The Summer Book.

Signe Hammarsten Jansson with Sophia Jansson on Klovharun, circa 1960s. Image source: ToveJansson.com