This book fit very neatly into my life these days for a few different reasons. To begin with, university-related responsibilities finally got serious - about time, you'd expect that after three years I would be tired already, but honestly I feel that in London I usually have more free time than I had in high school back in Venezuela. Until now, that is. So even though it is pretty short, and actually much easier to read than I expected, I read it very intermittently. Because of this, the lack of a straight-up plot that I've missed in some of the previous books of this list, actually played in my favour: I would usually be content having read a chapter or two at a time.
Also, I've recently had to put quite a bit of time into planning "The Future" and whatever will become of it after this year in London. Some plans have already failed, others have come up, new ideas have arisen - all in all, it's a very tolling process. Fortunately classes finish this week, and with that comes a brief break. But these past few weeks, through "Sommerboken", I've had brief incursions into a little Baltic idyll that have been nearly as refreshing.
Well there, that's where I've been for the past few weeks. Now on with the book...
I can't remember if I read this in the foreword or elsewhere, but even though Sophia and her grandmother were born decades apart, they seem to take turns in being the driving force of their relationship. Sometimes it was Sophia's naivety that made her be so determined, and it was heaps of fun to be led by the hand by an - 8-year old? Who also happens to be a bit more obscure than your average 8-year old, I think. Not that I know many 8-year old at the moment, but this girl... This girl is up to something:
"You know what, sometimes I think it's deadly boring when everything is alright."
(I actually spent a lot of time reading this book with a dictionary beside me), which immediately reminded me of that old Garbage song, "I'm only happy when it rains".
And sure enough, Sophia ends up having some kind of fascination with storms which I found quite charming, but I can't exactly say why. I suppose that growing up, or at least spending a big part of your childhood in these windy northern archipelagos gives you fixations that a sprawling city cannot.
I also quite liked the romantic idealist in Sophia:
"There's something weird about love," said Sophia. "The more you love another, the less the other likes you."
"That's quite true," noted her grandmother. "And what do you do then?"
"You keep loving," said Sophia menacingly. "You keep loving all the more badly."
to the point that I got personally threatened when her grandmother was a bit too cynical when talking about religion, and not that I'm a religion person myself, but Sophia just kind of wants to believe in something, whatever it is, and her grandmother keeps being the nagging voice of reason and old-age behind her. The grandmother's really smart about it though: Sophia will only push her grandmother as far as her limited language allows. Once the grandmother finds the gap in Sophia's logic (like saying, "yes but I prayed before you did, so clearly it was God's answering to me"), Sophia becomes just as willing to believe her as she had been to persuade her just a minute before.
Rhetoric and beliefs aside, I appreciated the heaps of down-to-earth popular wisdom:
"Dreams require a good amount of petrol."
(There was another bit which I tried to translate but gave up after a while. Something about wanting kittens in June and a drunken cat by the first of September, and about needing something to desire in between, which also reminds me of "Singing softly to me", by The Kings of Convenience.)
As I write this I realize that this is probably the main message I'm taking from this book (this time around): these in-between periods of time - like "the summer", or at least the Western conception of "the summer" and "holidays" that we live with - are really important in more than a few ways. We need to fill them up with something meaningful, even if it has little to do with the rest of our years. I don't really know what Sophia's father was working on the whole summer on his table, and I don't know where Sophia goes to school or if the mother has ever been a part of this family, but all of these temporary adventures are essential. Even if you stop believing them afterwards, this hands-on escapism is wonderful and necessary.
Just one thing:
SvarSlettSophia doesn't seem to go to school, and the way she acts, I don't think she could be older than 6.
All right, another thing: I would have translated those sentences differently to make them flow better/stay closer to the original text - but then I am a different person, so of course I would.
Argh, my comment disappeared.
SvarSlettWhere do you find a drunken cat? They are talking about "en druknet katt", i.e. a drowned one.
And why would you stop believing the adventures? I think they're very likely to have happened, on an island in the north of Finland in the early 1970s.
Right, my bad: I meant drowned, not drunken. I did understand "drowned", but for some reason the word just didn't come to my mind when I wrote this.
SvarSlettAnd what I mean with "believing" the adventures is this (I now realize I didn't express it clearly at all): have you ever gone into a holiday period saying something along the lines of "oh, well this summer I'd like to be more of a..." or "to do more of...", but then it turns out you didn't really enjoy whatever that was as much as you expected?
So it's not about believing what actually happen - I don't think this is one of those "ooh let's doubt the ephemeral reality of the summer" kind of stories, I do think everything happened as it is told. But about the mental journey that one goes through.
Probably these two things are not that connected, but my train of thought was along these lines. Maybe Sophia wouldn't really have believed that she "summoned" the storm for much longer (or that she had as much control over the world as she thought she had). The summer I spent in Oslo just over a year ago, I told myself: I'll go for more walks by myself around town to get to know this place in a different way. So I walked often alone through parks and little streets and cafés, but eventually realized that even though yes, I value my alone time a lot, I prefer to go for walks with someone, to be able to share impressions on the spot. But still the memories of that summer are those of a Juan who believed in wandering around in solitude hoping to find urban revelations behind any random corner. I no longer see myself that way, but I still think it was fun to get to know Oslo (whatever limited areas I did) that way.
Of course it might have more to do with Sophia's ever-changing mentality, but well... That's what I meant.
Ah, the dangers of being multi-lingual.
SvarSlettI think I understand you better now. But that's the point of asking and discussing, isn't it?
I had other thoughts but they disappeared into everyday life and I can't find them.
Oh of course! Haha, I think it's taken us a while to get used to this "discussion" part that we talked about.
SvarSlettAnd I know what I'm getting you for Christmas - hint: somewhere to put all those thoughts so you can find them later ;)
I've been discussing a lot in my mind, and I also lost one brilliant comment I wrote, all about feminism and important stuff, and I was too tired to rewrite it (this was November, I think).
SvarSlettAnd yes. I think the format needs to change to once a month, not twice. It's too often to have the time and energy to discuss in addition to reading and writing and the rest of life.