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.