Sun City

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.＂

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.