This is a short story.
The narrator’s father is admitted to a hospital in Amsterdam, where he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which will soon lead to his death.
He is a taciturn and reserved man who opens up to his daughter, the narrator, speaking of the family and the grandfather.
One of the themes is his wife’s habit of “telling lies”—that is, inventing family episodes.
The narrator thus realizes that “much of my past could have been fabricated by my mother.”
The theme of the story is the family myth: the capacity to mythologize, idealize, and imagine a familial memory, which subsequently exerts a decisive influence on the mental, psychological, and cultural development of descendants.

During those extreme weeks in Amsterdam I thought about origins.
I thought around my grandfather.
I also thought about certain origin myths I had pieced together as a child to explain things that were important, my sense of being from the north, the fear of art, the inevitability of the end

.
Mythological elaboration is the defining element of this memory, which does not photograph reality, is not history, but allows one to receive a world of values and sensations.
The narrator imagines that her paternal family was like the pantheon of Norse gods, “wild, extravagant, harsh, sturdy, and terrifying,” and that

her mother’s lies were to sweeten and soften my father’s stormy, cold world

.
Invention in storytelling is a way to free ourselves from grief, from the barrenness of life, from the inexorable approach of death:

what is all this, this entire story I am telling you, if not a careful selection of things that can be spoken, that can be brought into the light of day? Alongside this construction stretch the dark shadows of unspoken things, because I do not want to, or do not dare to say them, or else I do not remember them, have misunderstood them, have forgotten them, or never knew them

.
If life is not what is real, but what is remembered and therefore narrated, then life is literature.
It does not restore people to us: “none of these words can bring him back to us.”
Only the myth and the story remain.
A short story, yet one of profound depth, both philosophical and literary.
The style is highly effective, constructed around an elaborate yet lucid syntax that makes reading it both pleasurable and effortless.

Sugar (in Sugar and other stories)