My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman (October 2018)
This book is about a young girl and how she deals with the death of her grandmother. It covers a lot of ground in the world of grief, loss, and longing and I thought Backman did a very nice job of conveying the many emotions that come with this territory. It eventually comes to a point of acceptance and recovery, a challenge Backman meets beautifully given the varied perspectives and experiences of the characters hurt by the death.
There is a magical element to this book that comes in the form of apology letters written by the grandmother to various people she left behind. The granddaughter, Elsa, takes on a major responsibility and delivers these letters. The process guides Elsa through the grieving process while also imparting a series of important life lessons. She learns, for example, that bad things in life can be overcome with an overload of good things or that people who have never been victimized will always assume an oppressor has a valid reason for mistreating another. She also comes to understand her own feelings by recognizing the ways a survivor of a tragedy always feels left behind by its victims.
But the big lesson of the book comes in the way the grandmother’s letters bring together a diverse group of characters to share their grief. The impromptu community is eventually able to come together and find strength in each other to take the next step and move on with their lives. The shared grief allows these otherwise different people to accept their diversity and discard the outside world’s pressure to feel, act, and be normal. In other words, by coming together in the aftermath of a shared loss, the characters give each other the support to grieve, accept, and grow. Eventually, they find themselves ready to move on, not just from the immediate loss of an important person, but also from the losses and disappointments that have been long buried and unacknowledged in the deepest recesses of their lonely, abandoned, and marginalized souls.
Footnotes / endnote
0. If I had to choose just one, I would recommend Ove.
I read this book after reading another of Backman’s novels, A Man Called Ove, but I didn’t enjoy this book as much. At the time of writing, I’m also nearly done with another of his works, Britt-Marie was Here, and my feeling for that book is the same. I think the books are good reading for those who like Backman’s style but for those who just need a light read, I think reading A Man Called Ove should do the trick.
