Customer Reviews

Saving Grandma

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4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you've read Portofino, you've just got to read Saving Grandma! But whatever you do, don't read Saving Grandma UNTIL you've read Portofino! Saving Grandma is the the followup to Portofino, so you'll want to know the history. I don't want to give it all away, but I'll say you're in for some seriously funny, crazy, off the wall antics when you read these books! I'll also say, I wish I knew Calvin. He seems like my kind of person! Still wondering if the movie for Portofino is ever going to be released.

After I read Frank Schaeffer's first novel, Portofino I hoped there would be more. there is! Saving Grandma. This has got to be the funniest book on growing up in a religious family ever. It happens to be set in an evangelical Protestant family but Saving speaks to everyone. I grew up in a strict Catholic home and can identify with Calvin, (the books hero) perfectly. Saving is also one of the best books I've ever read when it comes to the innere workings of religion in America, albeit the book is set in a Protestant mission in Switzerland. Anyone who wants to come to terms with the religious nature of our country, and have a good honest laugh along the way will want to read this outstanding book. Frank Schaeffer is our new Mark Twain. Both Saving Grandma and Portofino are a wonderful holliday read. Also My womens group read both books back to back last year and we still all say that they were the best books we've done yet. There were women from all backgrounds, Catholic, Jewish and Protestant as well as agnostic in the group of abpout 12 of us. We ALL loved Saving Grandma and laughed so hard we could hardly get through some chapters.

One of my favorite books of all time is Portofino. I read it in 1993, shortly after the book came out, and it is a book that I could read time and time again, so likeable is Calvin Becker, so alive the sights and smells of Portofino, and so funny and bittersweet it's insights.

So it was with great anticipation that I read "Saving Grandma", Schaeffer's sequel to Portofino, picking up roughly where the other left off.

I was not at all disappointed. While the book fills you with a little more angst, as you suffer along with Calvin waiting to see how it all turns out, the book is as sweet, as funny, as colorful as Portofino. This book proves that you don't have to write a thriller to write a page turner, I devoured the last 150 pages in one sitting where I got up only to go to the bathroom, and took the book along with me, reading as I walked.

If you liked Portofino, you'll love Saving Grandma. I suggest reading Portofino first, as the two are very much intertwined.

Does anyone know if a follow up book is planned? the ending seemed to suggest it.

Or "Zermatt", its own sequel, either.

In "Saving Grandma", Calvin Dort Becker shifts between the nearly unbearable tension in his family chalet/mission that began with his unbelieving grandmother coming to live with his missionary family, and the nearly equally unbearable tension of adolescence. I found both the portraits of his family--particularly his father and his grandmother, who come to the fore more than his mother and sisters in this sequel to "Portofino"--to be compelling and interesting, and the crisis his father created in his ministry to be humorously absurd but nonetheless genuine. And I absolutely adored Calvin's fantasy life where his thoughts would escape from the travails at home into his imagined time with his beloved Jennifer.

What seemed missing to me was any connection between the narrator--an older Calvin in the first person--and the parts of Calvin that are not typical of nearly fifteen year-old boys: his illiteracy and his blindness to the incredible chances he is willing to take with others' lives, as when he nearly kills the "spastics" his family mission cared for, or when he tampers with his grandmother's IV. The narrator neither judges his prior life nor explains how he got from there to here.

I did, however, laugh out loud, particularly at the ending when he returned to Portofino and I smiled a lot at the end.

I read Portofino & really enjoyed it & was anxious to read the sequel. I enjoyed it, too, & even laughed out loud at a number of places. Grandma is a great character & a good addition to the Becker fictional family. But nonetheless, there's a disturbing note of bitterness in this novel that wasn't there in Portofino. The whole Becker clan -- except for the two non-calvinists, Calvin & Grandma -- have gone totally bonkers & Dad is getting more violent by the day. We know that Frank S. has rejected Calvinism & his parents' ministry & has gone to Orthodoxy. I guess these novels are Franky's revenge.

I started reading Schaeffer with his funny and touching Portofino. I was sure he could not top that book. He did! Saving Grandma is the best thing since Huck Fin, no kidding Andre Dubus (House of Sand and Fog) calls Shaeffer "The new American Twain" and he is not exagerating. Saving Grandma cuts to the heart of what it meansd to grow up. It is also the best book I've ever read about growing up ion a religious houshold. Maybe this is the perfect novel about being young! My book club rated this book as the favorite of the year.

It's even more trouble for the Becker missionary family when the unsaved, uncouth, and unpleasant mother of Ralph Becker moves in to their Switzerland chalet. Young Calvin, now fifteen years old and full of adolescent longing for his girlfriend Jennifer, must put up not only with the thoroughly distasteful antics of his grandmother, but also endure the nasty aftershocks of a church split and watch his father grow more and more unhinged. Though Grandma is unpleasant, over time, he begins to see how perhaps they had more in common than he had thought, which spurs him to think about whether he really belongs in his increasingly loony family at all.

This novel, the sequel to Portofino, takes place two years after the events in that book. It is a longer and less humorous novel than the first, and is also a bit less focused as a result. Schaeffer's best passages, as in the first book, deal with the excesses of the evangelical subculture and in the lovely portraits of the Italian coast, which is largely filtered through Calvin's sex-driven fantasies in this novel. Most of the humor this time comes from aspects that will make evangelicals raise their eyebrows: Grandma's profuse swearing, the lampoons of fundamentalist seperatism, and sex, lots of it, sometimes quite explicit (par for the course for a mainstream literary novel--but really hot for an evangelical novel). Much of the pathos of the book, for this reader, comes from Calvin's intense longing to be with his true love and his alienation from the subculture that his family inhabits and embodies. The combination of the two is still a potent mix, and it is set inside a rollicking, fast-paced narrative that made the book a genuine page-turner from start to finish. Some of the situations seemed a tad exaggerated to be believable (such as the church split situation), but the novel's other strengths readily overcame the brief suspension of belief. I can readily recommend the book in conjunction with Portofino.

Calvinists will probably not be amused at this portrayal of religious missionaries embroiled in their daily struggles to defeat sin, heresy, church politics, and the sinister machinations of the Vatican. The boy narrator, Calvin, and his iconoclastic, foul mouthed grandmother provide delightful contrast to the religious drudges that make up the rest of the family. The characterizations are quite good, and the story is great fun to read.

Saving Grandma is a fascinating book. I read it practically in one sitting. Besides the fact that the book is fast-paced and humorous a la Adrian Mole, it intrigued me because I happen to know that the author is himself the son of Calvinist missionaries who established an institute similar to L'Arche in the same region of Switzerland that the book is set in. I do not know all the details of Frank Schaeffer's life as a young man, but I do know that some of the incidents in the book bear a remarkable resemblance to real-life events. After having participated directly in his parents' enterprise, Frank Schaeffer has rejected their Calvinism and converted to Greek Orthodoxy. Can we expect to see a third novel (Portofino was the first, and I can't wait to read it!) in this series in which young Calvin grows up and adopts the Greek Orthodox faith or something very much like it? I certainly hope so, for I am very fond of Calvin Becker, and I congratulate Frank Schaeffer for the progress he has made in his spiritual life. Nothing deadens the human soul like the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.

After thoroughly enjoying Portofino,re-reading and loving it even more the 2nd time around, recommending it to my book club ,etc, I couldn't wait to read Saving Grandma. Altho it was funny at times, I found the humor very 'dark". All Calvin really cared about was sex-with his "little thing", with Jennifer' and helping his friend. Come on!!!I can't picture that one. Grandma was not one bit believeable-too one dimensional, Dad was in a REALLY bad mood, for sure, and Mom was losing it as well. Sorry, but I won"t be recommending this book!