{"product_id":"sun-city-isbn-9781681378657","title":"Sun City","description":"\u003cb\u003eFrom the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Summer Book\u003c\/i\u003e and creator of the Moomins, an off-beat novel about a retirement community in sunny Florida.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In \u003ci\u003eThe Summer Book\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe True Deceiver\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In \u003ci\u003eSun City\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.”\u003ci\u003e“Sun City\u003c\/i\u003e has an acid authenticity, and I find myself feeling that Tove Jansson must know St. Petersburg personally. Set next to \u003ci\u003eThe Summer Book\u003c\/i\u003e, it is an indictment of the American way of old age. . . . It is a book which ought to be read.” —Madeleine L’Engle\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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, \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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,\u003ci\u003e The Baffler\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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, \u003ci\u003eThe Times Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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 \u003ci\u003eSun City\u003c\/i\u003e—but this is a book of life and hope.” —\u003ci\u003eChicago Daily News\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eSun City,\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"If Jansson was mostly preoccupied with the wild elements of the natural world, both in her globally beloved \u003ci\u003eMoomin\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003e4Columns\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Jansson’s sentences are imbued with clarity and mystery in equal measure.” —Matthew Jakubowski, \u003ci\u003eThe Kenyon Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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, \u003ci\u003eThe Yale Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Jansson has a knack for packing a good deal of wit and wisdom into ostensibly simple tales.” —Olivia Laing, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eTove Jansson\u003c\/b\u003e (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 \u003ci\u003eGarm\u003c\/i\u003e, where Jansson's most famous creation, Moomintroll, made his first appearance. Jansson also wrote eleven novels and short-story collections for adults, including \u003ci\u003eThe Summer Book, The True Deceiver\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eFair Play\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Woman Who Borrowed Memories\u003c\/i\u003e (all available as NYRB Classics).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eThomas Teal\u003c\/b\u003e has translated Tove Jansson's \u003ci\u003eThe Summer Book\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe True Deceiver\u003c\/i\u003e,\u003ci\u003e Fair Play\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003eThe Woman Who Borrowed Memories\u003c\/i\u003e. He lives in Massachusetts.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299784446181,"sku":"NP9781681378657","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781681378657.jpg?v=1767737527","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/sun-city-isbn-9781681378657","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}