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Do a nice thing for yourself and read this book
Book Review
By Derryll White
Backman, Fredrik (2015). My Grandmother Sends Her Regards & Apologizes.
Backman’s first novel was ‘A Man Called Ove,’ and it was recognized as a beautiful, best-selling comic novel.
‘My Grandmother Sends Her Regards & Apologizes’ carries on in that vein, unabashedly funny, sometimes sad, and very poignant. Backman takes some simple truths such as the accepted common laws of society and the proper place of young children, and turns them on their head.
Elsa is seven-years-old (almost eight) and an accomplished veteran of Wikipedia. Her Granny is 77 and has the super ability to relate one-to-one with her granddaughter and to transport her to magic realms where the world can be more easily understood and managed. It is indeed a super power and in my eyes Granny is a super hero. And the six Kingdoms of Miamas are far more real than the world we normally inhabit.
‘My Grandmother…’ works wonderfully on many levels. Just think of the power of linked generations – a grandmother who has taken on some of the worst the world can offer, solely devoted to an almost-eight-year-old little girl who is different and too smart for her peers and school to accept. Think of a woman who creates thousands of instances of empowerment through imagination and places her granddaughter in the centre of it all. What can we create if we let ourselves be truly unfettered?
There is a high degree of intent in this novel. You are what you tell yourself you are. You can live outside your confines, putting fear aside and moving into action. It is a beautiful story that offers access to a world of change and growth through the eyes of a little girl.
What a wonderful book. I read and smiled and grinned and outright laughed throughout. People asked me why I was so happy. “A beautiful book I am reading about the trying life of Elsa, an almost-eight-year-old Swedish girl,” I replied. We all have to believe in something.
So, an allegory that sweeps the reader from the heights of love to the depths of despair. I think one is not supposed to cry in fairy tales. I sat in Hot Shots café and tears rolled down my cheeks as I finished ‘My Grandmother Sends Her Regards & Apologizes.’
Do one really nice thing for yourself in 2016. Read this book!
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Excerpts from the novel:
SOCIETY – But one day someone decided she was too old to save lives, even if Elsa quite strongly suspects what they really meant by ‘too old’ was ‘too crazy.’ Granny refers to this person as ‘Society’ and says it’s because everything has to be so bloody politically correct nowadays that she’s no longer allowed to make incisions in people. And that it was really mainly about Society getting so bleeding fussy about the smoking ban in the operating theatres, and who could work under those sorts of conditions.
CHANGE – Because they knew that if the shadows were allowed to take the Chosen One, it would kill all music and then the power of the imagination in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. After that there would no longer be anything left that was different. All fairy stories take their life from the fact of being different. ‘Only different people change the world,’ Granny used to say. ‘No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.’
SELF – Elsa hears how the drunk starts singing her song. Because not all monsters look like monsters. There are some that carry their monstrosity inside.
LOGIC – If you don’t like people they can’t hurt you. Almost-eight-year-olds who are often described as ‘different’ learn that very quickly.
STRENGTH – 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.
TIME – The Noween is a prehistoric monster that wants everything to happen immediately. Every time a child says ‘in a minute’ or ‘later’ or ‘I’m just going to…’ the Noween bellows with furious force: ‘Nooo! IT HAS TO BE DONE NOW!’ The Noween hates children because children refuse to accept the Noween’s lie that time is linear. Children know that time is just an emotion, so ‘now’ is a meaningless word to them, just as it was for Granny. George used to say that Granny wasn’t a time-optimist, she was a time-atheist, and the only religion she believed in was Do-it-later-Buddhism.
LIVING – 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.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
