I read Tove Jansson’s Winter Book about two months ago. How do you pin down a book like this? It’s beginning to look as if I don’t. Probably best to leave it to the experts.
Philip Pullman is the man for my money, as he waxes lyrical with respect to this collection: “They are as tough as good rope, these stories, as smooth and odd and beautiful as sea-worn driftwood, as full of light and air and wind as the Nordic summer.”
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This was a book that ended up under the Christmas tree following an, admittedly, quite broad hint. I have lots of cookery books and tend not to discuss them; because my criteria for their success or otherwise are standard and of limited range. ‘Do the recipes work and are they presented with adequate clarity?’ pretty much sums it up.
However my Moomin book has illustrations and quotes, ten ways to make porridge, and a recipe for onion and anchovy sandwiches. It is the latter which spawned the ‘must have’ factor.
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The Summer Book. Wonderful. Only one minor (and largely self-inflicted) complaint: semi-autobiographical, the blurb and the foreword give factual particulars that do not appear within the novel. Factual they may be, but the novel is fiction. I wished I had not made myself party to the unauthorised information because this is a book with an astute and calculating author. Everything is told or not told with good reason.
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The Summer Book, I had thought, would make superb holiday reading for Scotland. Even the cover put me optimistically in mind of the Highlands.
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In some sense, a light weight volume, but worth reading for several reasons. Least significantly, a Finnish writer to add to my list for the Fifteen Countries Challenge but, more importantly, a children’s book which, unusually, spans my daughters’ age range of 4-10 years, although I cannot vouch that every four-year old would have sufficient attention span (mine normally does not), nor that every ten-year old would not have progressed beyond such charming whimsicality. It also features some intriguing ideas…
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