Sun City - by Tove Jansson (Paperback)

About the Book

"From the author of The Summer Book and creator of the Moomins, an off-beat novel about a retirement community in sunny Florida. In works like The Summer Book and The True Deceiver, as well as in her many short stories, Tove Jansson was drawn again and again to the everyday life of the aged. Not as a group apart, but as full-blooded people, with as many jealousies, urges, and joys as any other group. And so it is no wonder that in her travels through America in the 1970s, she became fascinated with what was then a particularly American instution, the retirement home, where older people live in their particular tightly knit worlds. She describes this world through several of its residents and employees making their way in an America riven by cultural divides and facing the death of its dream, as they face their own mortality"--

Book Synopsis

From the author of The Summer Book and creator of the Moomins, an off-beat novel about a retirement community in sunny Florida.

In The Summer Book and The True Deceiver, as in her many short stories, Tove Jansson was drawn again and again to the everyday life of the aged. Not as a group apart but as full-blooded people with as many jealousies, urges, and joys as any other group. It's no wonder that in her travels through America in the 1970s she became fascinated with what was then a particularly American institution, the retirement home, where older people live in their particular tightly knit worlds.

In Sun City, Jansson depicts these worlds in a group portrait of residents and employees at the Berkeley Arms in St. Petersburg, Florida. As the narrative moves from character to character, so the characters move through an America riven by cultural divides, facing the death of its dream. The Berkeley Arms's newest resident finds a place among the rocking chairs and endless chatter on the veranda, while other residents long for past glories, mourning their losses and killing time. Meanwhile one of their attendants, Bounty Joe, is eagerly awaiting a letter, or even just a postcard, alerting him to the imminent return of Jesus Christ. "Nobody's normal anymore," as the bartender says, "not the old geezers and not the newborn kids."

Review Quotes

"Sun City has an acid authenticity, and I find myself feeling that Tove Jansson must know St. Petersburg personally. Set next to The Summer Book, it is an indictment of the American way of old age. . . . It is a book which ought to be read." --Madeleine L'Engle

"Her style is not at all 'poetic'--quite the contrary. It is prose of the very highest order; it is pure prose. Through its quiet clarity we see unreachable depths, threatening darkness, promised treasures." --Ursula K. LeGuin, The Guardian

"Jansson is best known for her Moomintroll comics, but those who have come to love her fiction for its gentle, if often pessimistic, humanism and her attention to the tactile and natural world will find those traits in Sun City." --B.D. McClay, The Washington Post

"The beauty of Jansson's books...comes from the way characters separated in age by decades navigate the friction created by their differences. But Sun City is structured around that beauty's absence. Though the novel has more characters living in closer proximity than in much of her other work, a gloomy loneliness hangs over every page. The novel approaches each character with open-hearted curiosity." --Bradley Babendir, The Baffler

"Jansson is ... content to let the narrative almost disappear into what Hegel called the "prose of the world" the beauty of the day-to-day. It is here ... that we find the true meaning of the novel." --Andreas Campomar, The Times Literary Supplement

"These are complicated people and Jansson demonstrates, with compassion and irony, how difficult it is for them to maintain their integrity in the face of indignities of growing old.... Her perceptions are crystalline and correct. Children live in the future, and the old live in the past, and Jansson understands this very well. Death is always in the air of Sun City--but this is a book of life and hope." --Chicago Daily News

"Sun City, her third novel for adults, proved that she was not merely a whimsical artist and storyteller, but also a keen cultural critic who could transpose her observations into powerful prose. It served as a response to skeptics who may have considered her literary work delightfully regional but not globally significant." --Lauren LeBlanc, The Atlantic

"If Jansson was mostly preoccupied with the wild elements of the natural world, both in her globally beloved Moomin comics and in the adult fiction she wrote in her last three decades, here, she is interested, instead, in a synthetic universe, man-made and mechanical, devised in particular US American fashion to sequester the elderly away from 'productive' society, in a preternaturally sunny silo where they won't 'be in the way.'" --Ania Szremski, 4Columns

"That there can still be as-yet untranslated fiction by Jansson is simultaneously an aberration and a delight, like finding buried treasure, especially when the translator is as well suited to her resonant, minimal style as Thomas Teal.... Jansson's own texts are always honed to perfection, given a lightness that proves deceptive, an ease of surface which, like ice over a lake, allows you rare access to something a lot riskier and more profound." --Ali Smith, The Guardian

"Jansson's sentences are imbued with clarity and mystery in equal measure." --Matthew Jakubowski, The Kenyon Review

"She infuses the awesome mystery of existence, its mix of joy, sorrow, wonder, and pain, into even her most buoyant writing and illustrations." --Evan James, The Yale Review

"Jansson has a knack for packing a good deal of wit and wisdom into ostensibly simple tales." --Olivia Laing, The Guardian

About the Author

Tove Jansson (1914-2001) was born in Helsinki, attended art schools in Stockholm and Paris, and upon her return to Finland in the 1940s won acclaim for her paintings and murals. It was in the left-leaning anti-Fascist Finnish-Swedish magazine Garm, where Jansson's most famous creation, Moomintroll, made his first appearance. Jansson also wrote eleven novels and short-story collections for adults, including The Summer Book, The True Deceiver, Fair Play, and The Woman Who Borrowed Memories (all available as NYRB Classics).

Thomas Teal has translated Tove Jansson's The Summer Book, The True Deceiver, Fair Play, for which he was awarded the Bernard Shaw Prize for Translation from the Swedish for the years 2007 to 2009. He also translated, with Silvester Mazzarella, Jansson's short story collection The Woman Who Borrowed Memories. He lives in Massachusetts.