Her struggle: The Summer Book and Swedish culture

I was the grumpy one last night at book group, somewhat less enthusiastic than the rest about Tove Jansson's The Summer Book. Though I admired many of the brief sketches that comprise this book - some beautiful passages, especially in the later chapters such as the closing down of the house for the season, and some pretty funny sequences such as Sophia's dictation of the angle-worm book to her grandmother, I felt the collection was too oblique. I wanted it to cover the arc of one summer of the maturation of the young child into a preteen or teenager - but it seemed to me arranged in no special sequence, perhaps the sequence of composition, aside from the first, last, and midpoint stories that did orient around the passage of summer months. BR had a great insight about the angleworms and how they are a metaphor for the young girl - broken but rejuvenating. I spoke probably too much about the isolation and coldness of the Swedish personality, the island - no outsiders allowed, no one good enough to meet our standard - as the perfect metaphor for this and the completely withdrawn father and the odd refusal to say or even think anything about the mother's death (and perhaps the grandmother's approaching death?) great examples of the Swedish closure. (These moods and personalities should be familiar to anyone who's watched Bergman films.) Some debate about whether the grandmother was kind and loving toward Sophia, and while most of the members found her very devoted (in a tough-love way) to the young girl, I found her to be ambivalent at best: insouciant about Sophia's safety at various points, a terrible example to the girl when she breaks into a neighbor's house, nasty to the one other child who visits on the island. There's a real toughness to Jansson herself - she wrote these in her 60s or so and though the may reflect on her own childhood it seems she also ID's with the cantankerous grandmother as much as w/ Sophia. Oddly - intentionally, actually - the book has few if any time markers: It could be the 1920s, 40s, or 60s - and that timelessness is another one of its "island" qualities: we never see the village or the mainland, know nothing about their winter life off the island, these are sketches, some quite beautiful others fairly slight, of a life cut off from others.