redshift

Gathering is peculiar, because you see nothing but what you’re looking for. If you’re picking raspberries, you see only what’s red, and if you’re looking for bones you see only the white. No matter where you go, the only thing you see is bones. Sometimes they are as thin as needles, extremely fine and delicate, and have to be handled with great care. Sometimes they are large, heavy thighbones, or a cage of ribs buried in the sand like the timbers of a shipwreck. Bones come in a thousand shapes and every one of them has its own structure.

Another of Tove Jansson’s books written for adults, The Summer Book is a gorgeously simple and captivating story about an old woman and her young grandchild spending summers together on an island off the coast of Finland. I find this story captivating, for many of the same reasons I was captivated by A Winter Book.

I’ve mentioned the story’s simplicity, which may need explanation. The language and description is wonderful and precise, with a sense that there are no wasted words, and it reads absolutely beautifully. The story itself is not complex, but it has a lot to say; about people and relationships and life and death and the sea. In relatively few words it paints absolutely vivid pictures of people, places, moments.

A book that I am really going to treasure, this.

Suddenly he burst out, “And now Backmansson is gone.”

“Where did he go?”

“He is no longer among us,” Verner explained angrily.

“Oh, you mean he’s dead,” said Grandmother. She started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn’t have time.