327. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry
Rating: ☆☆☆
Recommended by: Heather Ringoen
Author: Frederik Backman
Genre: Fiction
372 pages, published June 16, 2015
Reading Format: Book
Summary
The protagonist of My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry is Elsa, a quirky seven year old who is picked on at school and who is learning to adapt to her parents’ divorce. Elsa’s closest friend and confidante is her 77 year old grandmother, a doctor who was always away traveling to war zones when raising her own daughter (Elsa’s mother) and who has very strong opinions matched by unpredictable actions. Elsa takes refuge in her grandmother’s stories, in the Land of Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miamas where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal. When Elsa’s grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged, Elsa’s greatest adventure and begins and she learns to come to terms with her own life.
Quotes
“People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will “lessen as time passes,” but it isn’t true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn’t be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.”
“We want to be loved,’ ” quotes Britt-Marie. “ ‘Failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. The soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.’ ”
“Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild’s ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details.”
“Only different people change the world,” Granny used to say. “No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.”
“Death’s greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.”
“I want someone to remember I existed. I want someone to know I was here.”
“Because not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow.”
“if you hate the one who hates, you could risk becoming like the one you hate.”
“People have to tell their stories, Elsa. Or they suffocate.”
“It’s strange how close love and fear live to each other.”
“Granny and Elsa used to watch the evening news together. Now and then Elsa would ask Granny why grown-ups were always doing such idiotic things to each other. Granny usually answered that it was because grown-ups were generally people, and people are generally shits. Elsa countered that grown-ups were also responsible for a lot of good things in between all the idiocy – space exploration, the UN, vaccines and cheese slicers, for instance. Granny then said the real trick of life was that almost no one is entirely a shit and almost no one is entirely not a shit. The hard part of life is keeping as much on the ‘not-a-shit’ side as one can.”
My Take
As a big fan of Frederik Backman (A Man Called Ove, Beartown, Britt-Marie Was Here), I was looking forward to reading My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry. While a good read, I would classify it as lesser Backman, in the same vein as Britt-Marie Was Here; interestingly the Britt-Marie character has a relatively large role in Grandmother). There are interesting characters and ideas, but on the whole it is not a compelling book.
