lessons learned and relearned

I’ve just completed reading My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman. He’s the one who wrote A Man Called Ove which was made into the movie A Man Called Otto with Tom Hanks recently. It’s a tear-jerking adult fairy tale of a book which skirts the edge of formulaic, contains frequent self-referential passages (which I find tiresome), tells a well-worn tale without breaking any new ground,…and I gave the book a five-star rating. For one thing, I like a pathos-riddled book which adroitly brings tears to my eyes. Mainly, though it’s for two other reasons I gave it those stars. The book re-taught me a lesson about reading (and therefore about life a bit): when you dislike a book (or a person or whatever) because it isn’t what you thought it was going to be, then you’re not disliking it for what it is, you’re disliking it for not living up to your expectations. If those expectations were based on very little, as most of our snap judgments tend to be, then it isn’t the book’s fault. In this case, my expectations were built upon some not-very-specific blurbs which said what the book was ‘about’. I expected a different storyline. Once I accepted it wasn’t going to follow my imagined plot, I realized I liked the book very much. (Had I not, I would have put it down, but with the acknowledgement that I did so based on what it was rather than what it wasn’t.)

Since the blurbs I read led me to expect a book where an adult protagonist runs around Europe delivering letters from her now-deceased grandmother, here’s my blurb, only slightly more accurate and still very vague:

When the grandmother of the “almost-eight-year old” protagonist dies, the granddaughter is charged by her Granny to deliver a series of letters to people from her grandmother’s past. Through this device, Backman weaves together the competing narratives of being someone’s hero and being a shit, and teaches a young, precocious girl that Truth (and Life) lie somewhere between the two. Oh, and along the way he makes a good case for forgiveness and tolerance, fairytales, loyalty, courage, and that anyone can redeem themselves and become a hero.

Me

Other than that, I liked the book for its style which led to some lovely little quotes:

“Only different people change the world,” Granny used to say. “No one normal has ever changed a crapping thing.”

Backman, Fredrik. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry: A Novel (p. 89). Atria Books. Kindle Edition.

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,…

Backman, Fredrik. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry: A Novel (p. 231). Atria Books. Kindle Edition

Because life is both complicated and simple. Which is why there are cookies.

Backman, Fredrik. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry: A Novel (p. 368). Atria Books. Kindle Edition.

I wish there were more quotes, but I became too involved in the novel to take time to highlight them. I’ve been gifted some alone-time what with my wife gone for a week, which led me to read hours yesterday and today, which I do too seldom much as I did before adulthood. (True, many would argue about calling me an adult, but I’ve shook them from my boots like the clods they were and kept walking.)

And now, because all posts deserve a photo, here are the mushrooms I’m going to sauté in an hour or two. After the fiasco of the first kit, my purveyors made good with one which burst forth in just seven days and has yielded these fully ripe, ready-to-harvest golden oysters in just 11 days: