2.5
Sun City
ByPublisher Description
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.”
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.”
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesSun City Reviews
2.5
alyssa
Created 2 months agoShare
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Booksandquilts
Created 2 months agoShare
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“I really wanted to like this book, but I just couldn’t connect with the characters. They lacked a certain amount of realism, but not in a good way. I also expected Bounty Joe to feature more because he seemed more extreme in his search for Jesus, but even that fell flat for me.”
Joey
Created 3 months agoShare
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“Very divided on this. Had the ramblings of an Altman movie, moving from person to person with ease, each vignette more personal, off-kilter, and vivid than the last.
That novelty wore off about 3/4 in; it’s not that I felt this needed a clear through line to make it worth it, but the lack of direction made itself clear about the same time as the characters started to feel less authentic. The beginning held me and the end lost me.”
ohia
Created 3 months agoShare
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lrenkate
Created 4 months agoShare
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“Well that was.. something. This isn’t a style of prose that I warmed to as the book meandered along, providing brief vignettes of our cast of elderly characters and their bitter sadness, loneliness, and the futility of age.”
About Tove Jansson
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.
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.
Other books by Tove Jansson
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