Something Good #115: Islands & Owls
"Winters are for the true weirdos:" Roxane Hudon on Tove Jansson and island life.
Writer and former alt-weekly colleague Roxane Hudon last appeared in these pages with her introduction to Irish writer Dervla Murphy for Barely a Book Club. Roxane writes and posts from her home on Fogo Island, off the coast of Newfoundland. In addition to being a great writer, she is one of my favourite readers, and when I saw her appreciation of Finnish writer, artist and fellow island-dweller Tove Jansson, I knew I had to ask her to write something about Jansson’s island-set The Summer Book.
It’s difficult to accurately describe life on an island to those who either romanticize or misunderstand it. After three years on Fogo Island, I can say that it’s larger than it looks, busier than people think, more social than I’ve been since my twenties. It’s only isolated if you choose it to be, only far depending on where you’re standing, only lacking if you need more than what is necessary.
When we first moved here from Montreal, I thought I would only last a year. It would be too lonely and boring. The silence, especially in winter, scared me. “It looks desolate,” wrote my dad when I sent him a photo of Fogo in March: grey, still, quiet. The truth is that I found something here that has been difficult for me to find anywhere else: happiness. Yes, I know, cringe. But it’s cringe to be happy, it’s goofy.
But I’m rambling, I’m on island time, I need to write about Tove Jansson, I’m getting to it. The Summer Book is one of the novels the famous children’s author wrote for “grown-ups.” It’s based on Jansson’s real-life niece Sophia and her grandmother (Jansson’s mother) as they spend a summer frolicking around a remote Finnish island, behaving as if they’re the same age, inventing worlds, sharing wisdom, getting up to no good, but always looking out for each other. In her simple prose, Jansson writes what I can’t seem to verbalize. She captures the beauty, frustration, and oddities of island life. Written after the death of her mother, it’s also fuelled by the author’s grief and love for her family. Across its bite-size chapters, this 171-page masterpiece carries more heart than books three times its size.
In a Guardian article published on the book’s 50th anniversary, Sophia said that her aunt was also poking fun at normality, that, “The island, for the characters and the real-life family, was a place to create a new kind of ‘normality’, away from the conventions of the mainland.”
I thought about that on a recent “urban intensive” to New York City, where I spent a week soaking up culture and grime. The assumption is that cities are where the weirdos live and, sure, strangers yell at you and generally seem unwell, but it doesn’t feel like the true weird I experience on Fogo Island.
Fogo Island might be more developed than Jansson’s island. We have a luxury inn, music festivals, restaurants, art galleries, and tourists in RVs looking for the water station. But all that will be gone soon when summer ends. Summer is an idyll of swimming in the sea and living outdoors, just like Jansson and her family did on their island. Winters are for the true weirdos. We say goodbye to the last of the part-time dwellers, and get ready to cocoon together, to embrace our creative projects and strangest thoughts, to be our slightly unhinged little selves away from it all.
I guess that’s my only problem with The Summer Book. For Jansson, her island bliss was seasonal. The cold drove her back to the city. Summer is for letting go, and then, it’s over, back to work, back to “real life.” In New York City, I felt like real life was no longer for me. There was an edge in the air. Of course, the current political climate, but also, the heat, the suicides, the power outages, the viral TikTokers running up in people’s faces. I might sound like a silly small-town girl, which I guess I am now, but in movies, when the end of the world comes, what’s the first thing people do? They run from the city.
“An island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.”
— Tove Jansson, The Summer Book
Roxane’s writing about books can be found at her Instagram account, Reading on Fogo Island.
I don’t know what to call this new newsletter feature yet, but in this space I’ll be sharing epigraphs I come across in my reading. They’re a literary form of their own and rarely are these quotes quoted.
This week’s is from Alan Garner’s The Owl Service:
—The owls are restless.
People have died here,
Good men for bad reasons,
Better forgotten—
R.S. ThomasI will build my love a tower
By the clear crystal fountain,
And on it I will build
All the flowers of the mountain.
TraditionalPossessive parents rarely live long enough to see the fruits of their selfishness.
Radio Times: 15 September 19
And in lieu of a #nojacketsrequired, and with apologies to its adherents, I give you my edition’s very good dust jacket:
Bonus track:
My newsletter provider, Buttondown, interviewed me about how and why I use their service. It’s been a year-and-a-half or so and I still like it; if you want to try them out, consider my referral link. No pressure!!
Thanks again to Roxane Hudon for bringing one last memory of summer. This was written before either of us realized there’s a movie adaptation of The Summer Book coming out, like, soon? With Glenn Close? I don’t know about any of this. If anyone sees it, please report back.
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