Fredrik Backman
My Grandmother Asked me to Tell you She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman, translated by Henning Koch, is the story of a precocious seven-year-old Elsa and her delightful relationship with her best friend—her cantankerous, incorrigible seventy-year-old grandmother. The roles are reversed in the relationship with Elsa talking and behaving well above her age while her grandmother flaunts social conventions and is prone to playing childish pranks.
The two communicate in a secret language and share a love for the Land-of-Almost-Awake and the kingdom of Miamas, an elaborately constructed fairy tale land peopled with magical creatures and heroes and monsters. The grandmother shares this fantasy land with Elsa to teach her the skills she needs to cope with her parents’ divorce, her mother’s remarriage and pregnancy, and the bullies who torment her in school. They journey together to this land of make-believe every night with her grandmother adding layers and detail to the story with each telling.
When her grandmother dies, Elsa feels angry, abandoned, and betrayed. But she is soon taken up with a treasure hunt left for her by her grandmother. She is tasked with locating and delivering her grandmother’s letters of apology to the group of misfits who live in their apartment building. Elsa learns the backstory of the individual with each letter she delivers. And she soon realizes that her grandmother’s Land-of-Almost-Awake is based on the characters and backstories of the apartment dwellers and that each connects to her grandmother in some way.
The third person narrative voice is entertaining when presenting Elsa’s perspective and comments. But the exposition of the interlocking mythologies of the Land-of-Almost-Awake with its several kingdoms and complex rules is unnecessarily elaborate and confusing. It detracts from the narrative. And the correspondences between the events and characters in the Land-of-Almost-Awake with the group of misfits doesn’t always work. The fantasy tales take on a life of their own and do not fit into the narrative organically. The effect is of a strained connection. With the exception of Elsa and her grandmother, character development is weak, with some of the portrayals bordering on caricatures.
Certain aspects of the novel are entertaining, but, on the whole, this is the not up to the quality of Backman’s other novels.