World Building

My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She's Sorry by Fredrik Backman

Whenever I see Becca, a contemporary of my daughters and a long-time family friend as well as former student, we talk books.  Becca is famous in our two families for stealing away from get-togethers to snatch a book off the shelf (her own or one of ours), curl up and lose herself in the power of story.  She is also seen by my two daughters and by her two sisters as the imaginative lynchpin to all of their childhood games, enthusiastically articulating a world that she weaves together on the spot, creating roles for each of them to play from beautiful fairies to large animals.  Most recently when I saw her, she brought out a stack of new bookstore purchases, all fantasy novels and only one of which I had heard of – The Night Circus.  “I loved that book,” I said.  “Hmm,” she said, “I liked it okay.  The concept was interesting but I am more into authors who are really good at world-building.  I want them to create a place I can disappear to.” 

I thought about her idea of world-building more than once as I listened to My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman  (author of A Man Called Ove.)  Backman succeeds in creating a world of stories within the larger narrative of the novel that seem initially unrelated but, in fact, are quite cleverly close.  The book reminds me of Big Fish because the stories that Granny tells seven year old Elsa seem like fairy tales with princesses, dragons and monsters in far off kingdoms, but after Granny dies, Elsa discovers that the stories, at their core, are about very real people who happen to exist in Elsa’s life.  Granny, like Edward Bloom of Big Fish, is, in many ways a larger-than-life character.  A bit crazy, she shoots a paintball gun off of her balcony and she and Elsa get picked up by the police when they are caught climbing a fence after hours at the zoo.  She curses like a sailor and smokes like a chimney.  When she is hospitalized, she has friends sneak in bottles of beer that she keeps hidden under her pillow.  She’s also traveled widely throughout her life, a gifted surgeon who has worked in war-torn countries and, like Edward, as it turns out, made a huge difference in the lives of strangers. 

Elsa is a precocious child, a pariah at school because she’s different (read “thoughtful,” “Imaginative,” inquisitive”) but whose young life is made easier by the mutual love she shares with 77-year-old Granny.  Significant to the narrative are the stories of the Land-of-Almost-Awake and the Kingdom of Miasma that Granny tells Elsa every night to help her sleep.  Throughout the novel, the reader is given fragments of these stories, enough to sense how crucial and comforting is this imaginative other world that Granny offers Elsa – not unlike the escape that, as Becca suggests, an excellent fantasy novel offers.  When Granny dies (early on in the book – not really a spoiler), Elsa is devastated.  Of course Granny has anticipated this and right before she dies, she gives Elsa a mission – a letter to deliver.  Having delivered that letter, another appears for her to deliver, until Elsa has gradually met the characters who inhabit the stories.  Amusingly, each letter is an apology to someone Granny feels she has wronged in some way, but also a plea for the recipient to protect Elsa in her absence.  The fellow inhabitants of Elsa’s small apartment building – the recipients of the letters – are all, in many ways deeply broken people that Granny has saved.  As they become Elsa’s friends and she smartly matches them up with the fairy tales she knows by heart, a deeper, more poignant picture emerges.

Backman creates funny moments in several ways.  However bright for her years, Elsa is sometimes naïve and the reader is amused by what she doesn’t realize.  As a child, she also presses adults with questions that someone with a stronger social sense would refrain from asking.  It is also funny that when she doesn’t understand something and needs to know more, Elsa’s go-to is Wikipedia, which we know provides all knowledge.  Like five year old Jack in Room, who refers to aspects of his little world without articles (He sleeps on Bed, lives in Room), Elsa likewise refers to the cars Granny and others drive in this way.  She and Granny climb into Renault, Dad drives Audi and Arf gives her a ride in Taxi.  Backman occasionally reminds me of J.K. Rowling with his clever turns of phrase and dry observations, and the reader of the audio version, interprets the language to masterful effect.

Backman’s  (or is it Granny’s?) alternative world, one filled with danger, heroes and heroines, dragons and monsters, shadows and sea angels at first seems a very different world from Elsa’s and the reader’s, but as Elsa’s real world and the stories begin to merge, Backman offers a poignant understanding of what it means to love and lose someone who is central to your own tale. 

Does a Woman Have to Be a Mother 

to be Fulfilled?

Coincidentally, recently I have read two books and seen a movie (based on a book I have also read) about women who desperately want but cannot have children.  First, the film – The Light Between Oceans staring Alicia Vikander (Isabel) and Michael Fassbender (Tom) as a married couple living on an island 100 miles off the coast of Australia where Tom is the lighthouse keeper.  Tom is content with the isolation after returning physically whole but psychologically damaged from WW1.  Isabel, at first, reveling in her newfound love soon desires a family. After a second miscarriage, this one very late term, she is devastated and broken.  When a rowboat washes up on the island 4 days later with a dead man and a live newborn baby, Isabel sees her salvation.  Tom’s first instinct is to notify the mainland, insisting that there must be someone missing the child, but Isabel’s sorrow and newfound joy are both so great that he relents.  If you haven’t read the book by M.L. Steadman or seen the gorgeous movie, I won’t spoil it for you, but an agonizing moral dilemma presents itself two years later when Tom and Isabel return to the mainland to introduce her parents to their grandchild. 

Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare is told in alternating voices, mainly those of Velvet Vargas, a disadvantaged Dominican Brooklyn teen, and Ginger, a white and affluent sometimes artist living in a small, bucolic town in upstate New York.  Both have their demons.  Ginger is 47, childless and a bit adrift, married to Paul, a college professor whom she met through AA.  Past the child-bearing age, she nevertheless desperately wants her own offspring and is continually affronted by Paul’s ex-wife and teenage daughter who reside in the same town.  She eagerly (and Paul reluctantly) agree to take a child through NYC’s Fresh Air Fund, thus bringing Velvet to their home for two weeks the summer she is eleven.  Velvet is angry, combative, picked on at school for her Salvation Army clothes and wild hair, and often the brunt of her single mother’s own anger and frustration. 

The story takes on greater complexity as Ginger bonds with Velvet.  Her desperate need to be maternal drives her to turn herself over to Velvet heart and soul.  They go to movies, take walks.  Ginger reads to her at night.  At the end of the two weeks, she cannot bear for Velvet to leave and they work through the Fresh Air Fund to get a fortnight extension.  The relationship continues over several years as Velvet comes up for weekends, holidays and more summers.  Ginger even communicates with Velvet’s teachers.  Paul watches with increasing alarm at what he considers to be Ginger’s over-involvement with Velvet, reminding her at one point that Velvet already has a mother, and as Ginger’s bond with Velvet grows, her marriage becomes increasingly strained.

Yet another story about a woman longing desperately for a child, The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey also takes place in the early part of the 20^th century as 40ish Mabel and Jack have left New England to homestead in Alaska.  Mabel welcomes the impending solitude, seeing it as an opportunity to leave behind the grief of having lost babies and what she perceives as the judgment of others because she is childless.  It is a sadness that never leaves her, however, and the miles of cold, snowy uninhabited land and the harsh, lonely challenges of life there seem to only make things worse.  One evening, after the first heavy snowfall, Jack and Mabel build a snow girl, decorating her with some of Mabel’s mittens and a scarf.  The next day, the clothing is gone, the snow figure fallen, and tiny shoe prints lead away from where the figure stood.  Soon after, they begin to glimpse a little blond-haired girl in a bright blue coat, wearing Mabel’s clothes, darting through the trees.  Over the coming winter months, they see her more often, and lure her to them by leaving her gifts.  Finally, she comes close and introduces herself as Faina.  She refuses to ever stay with them, however, preferring to hunt and trap and generally fending for herself.  When the snows finally melt and springtime arrives, Faina disappears.  Mabel’s heart has been lifted by the presence of the child and she returns to a sense of despair.  When another couple who live ten miles down the road befriend Jack and Mabel, Mabel tries to tell them about Faina, but Jack pretends not to have seen her, causing both the new friends (Esther and George) and the reader to wonder about Mabel’s sanity.  When Faina returns with the first snow, Mabel recalls a childhood book which she asks her sister to send to her.  The story of the snow child is about an old childless couple who fashion a girl out of snow; the snow child comes alive, becoming a surrogate daughter, but disappearing into the mountains when warm weather comes to the farm.  Mabel has noticed that Faina’s skin is quite cold to the touch and she sweats profusely when she is in the warm cabin too long.  Faina seems to be able to conjure up snow and one day, catches a snowflake and asks Mabel, who keeps a sketchpad, to draw it.  The snowflake does not melt in Faina’s hand.  Could they be living the story?  Is Mabel’s longing for a child so great that she has wished this child into being?

Does a woman have to be a mother to be fulfilled?  Two of these books are set in the second decade of the 20^th century, a time, perhaps, when roles for women were significantly more limited. I suspect that most modern women with a wider range of choices would respond in the negative; there’s also no guarantee that having children will, in and of itself, lead to self-actualization.  While The Light Between Oceans and The Mare raise other questions in addition to this one, The Snow Child’s focus is squarely on the despondent Mabel who, in the opening scene of the book, purposely walks out on ice she thinks is not solid. But even Mabel, who has to become stronger and more active due to the challenges of the unforgiving environment, begins to find self-worth in discovering that there are multiple ways that women can be validated – through friendship, through hard work, and yes, through being a mother.