Notes from an Island

This is Sophia from The Summer Book, grown to adulthood and into possession of her own island cabin. That it's a memoir of Tove and Tooti's life on the small rock skerry of Klovharun is both incidental and central.

As with much of Tove's adult writing, this is a quiet book, telling of little moments which seem inconsequential and mundane, and which fit together into an intimate picture of life and lives shared.

Tooti's monochrome watercolour wash paintings of the islands are, not unsurprisingly, a perfect and evocative accompaniment to Tove's writing.

After finishing the book, I watched a few trailers for the film, "Haru, Island of the Solitary", which was edited together from cine camera footage the two shot of their island life, and now show more I want to hunt down the DVD of the whole film. This short French documentary (with English subtitles) is wonderful, including an interview with Tove's niece, Sophia, filmed on Klovharun: https://youtu.be/sjRfrpKeDU0 show less

t is astonishing the number of people who go around dreaming of an island. Tove Jansson, The Island

In 1979 my family hosted a Finnish exchange student, Elina, for a year. She lived on the Arctic Circle, her father a forester. I remember Elina telling us about Sisu, and how Finns like solitude. She told a story about a man who moved upriver into the deep woods. He was happy until he noticed something that had floated down the river, indicating someone had built a cabin upstream. He was incensed, so walked upriver a few days, shot the interloper, and happily returned home.

The drive for solitude can seem incomprehensible in a world addicted to constant, instant communication. Or, perhaps, we all secretly dream of our own island?

Notes From show more an Island tells the story of how Tove Jansson, famous for her Moomie children’s books, and her partner Tooti, spent summers on an island. It tells how they built their island summer home and the life they enjoyed there, illustrated with Tooti’s artwork of the island. Additionally included is Tove’s essay The Island, illustrated with photographs.

The first island they summered on was “paradise” but gradually filled with people. Tove and Tooti searched for another island, one that would offer solitude.

They found their dream island. It was under seven thousand square meters, shaped like an atoll with a lagoon. First, they lived in a tent, dreaming of the cabin they would build. One day, a man arrived who warned that rather than wait for permission, they should build the cabin right away, and with his help, they got to work.

They brought Tove’s eighty-three-year-old grandmother Ham, who lived in the tent which flooded, Ham laughing as she waded ashore. They used nets to catch fish to feed themselves and the cat.

Ham expresses her amazement at people who come and ask if it doesn’t get a little boring with nothing but rocks and the horizon, and don’t we miss nature? from Notes From an Island by Tove Jannson

Tove’s descriptions are seductive, documenting the variety of beauty to be experienced on the island.

A helicopter dropped them on the island to experience the break-up of the ice. Tove describes how “Unbelievable tabernacles floated by, driven by a mild south-west breeze, statuesque, glittering, as big as trolleys, cathedrals, primeval caverns, everything imaginable! And they changed colour whenever they felt like it–ice blue, green and, in the evening, orange. Early in the morning they could be pink.”

She writes of spring on the island: “Every spring, it’s the scurvy-grass flower that comes first…The flower is white and tiny and has a sharp smell. The next to come is the wild pansy, then all the others in a perfect frenzy of blossoming.”

The eiders nested on the island, the gulls raiding the nests. Migrating birds stopped by.

There was flotsam to collect, driftwood to salvage for firewood. Mending of the cabin and the woodshed with its metal roof covered with tar and turf. Cleaning out the chimney. Days of deep fog, listening to the engines and fog horns of passing boats.

When you’ve been alone for a very long time, you begin to listen differently, to feel the organic and the unexpected all around, and see the incomprehensible beauty of the material world. Tove Jansson, The Island

In their seventies, they realized the time had come to give up their island retreat. It was a rugged, demanding life, and Tove realized she was becoming afraid of the power of the ocean.

This enchanting book will appeal to anyone who has ever dreamed of escape.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley show less

An entirely unexpected book, plucked at a whim from a shelf at work today, read almost entirely in one sitting.
It's strange in some ways — in others, not so much. At once it's a simple account of Jannson's life — shared with her lifelong partner — on a small, nigh-inhospitable island off the Finland coast. Accompanied by Tooti's art of the island and its environs, this book is at once charming and enigmatic. It's very single-minded, focusing almost austerely on the day-to-day realities of their inhabitance, yet it's through this sparsity that the island is evoked in far more certain terms than any simple words might attempt.

I only have a vague childhood memory of the Moomins but when my daughter was ten she travelled through Finland with her Gymnastics team and bought me back a Moomin keychain from her visit to the Moomin Museum. The Moomins, a family of fairy-tale trolls, are the most famous creation of the late Finnish author and artist Tove Jansson (1914-2001).

Notes from an Island is the result of a collaboration between Jansson and her lifelong partner, artist Tuulikki Pietilä, known as "Tooti" (1917-2019). The couple met in the mid 1950’s and in 1963, looking for privacy and peace, built a summer home on the barren island of Klovharun, at the edge of the Pellinge archipelago in the Gulf of Finland. They stayed on the island in the cabin they built show more with the generous help of Brunstrom, a local fisherman, every year for nearly 30 summers, until the conditions proved too challenging for their advancing age.

The narrative is spare, comprised of brief notes and lists written by Tove, as well as log entries contributed by Brunstrom. It mentions the everyday tasks needed to survive on the island from net fishing, to gathering wood, and maintaining the fixtures the weather regularly destroyed, and includes descriptive observations of the weather and landscape. Short vignettes outline activities like tobogganing, gardening, turning over rocks, or listening to the fog horns of passing boats, but overall the writing in Notes From an Island is almost as impressionistic as Tooti’s paintings, which accompany the text.

Unfortunately due to the limitations of the black and white reproductions in the ebook some of Tooti’s paintings are inscrutable, so I searched online for a clearer look. The monochrome watercolours depicting the island and its surrounds, are quite lovely though obviously best presented in a coffee table format.

At under 100 pages in length, Notes From An Island is a quick read and though it does have a meditative quality I don’t expect it will leave a lasting impression on me. show less

wishlisted Blackwells - several pages marked - see paper Bookmark - finished at Greenwood July 2025 - perfect night table reading

Delightful

Color photocopy of the original