Astrid Hawk

Another disappointment - this is what I get for just picking up a book based on its cover. I think this one suffered from being in translation. There was a lot of telling rather than showing - a lot of sentences constructed from pronoun/name + filter verb (I just recently learned this is what I dislike in writing that makes it feel less professional and more childish to me). The perspective shifted a lot, often mid-paragraph. And the characters just all seemed a bit... off. Unrealistic. Exaggerated in places, and overly simplified in others. I don't know how much of this was Japanese culture and literature that got lost in translation, and how much of this was a man writing women and failing at it.

This was vastly disappointing for me. I've heard great things about Backman's work, and I enjoyed his short story "The Answer is No" - I found it ironically humorous and thought he did a great job plainly and succinctly capturing the human condition in that story. I was looking forward to reading more, and thought this book had the makings of a mature, poignant story about friendship, love, and survival. I was dead wrong.

In this book we follow Louisa, a freshly-turned-18-year-old girl who has grown up in group foster homes and recently lost her best friend who helped her get through said foster homes. She has a chance encounter with an artist she has idolized for years through one of his early works, and when he dies that night, he bequeaths his painting to her. She attaches herself to the painting's guardian Ted, one of the artist's childhood friends, because she is newly emancipated and homeless, and has no idea what to do with a valuable work of art. For much of the rest of the book, Ted and Louisa travel by inexplicably long train journey to Ted's hometown, and Ted tells Louisa about his friends from one pivotal summer in their childhood, the summer that the artist created the painting she now "owns".

I was disappointed with this book from the start when I realized that we were following a teenager who is frankly idiotic at all turns, and behaves more like a 13-14 year old than an 18 year old. In fact, you can't tell the difference, really, between Louisa at 18 and all the kids in Ted's memories, who are all 14 going on 15. Louisa is really really really annoying - intentionally so, because she's supposed to be a foil to Ted, who is oh so old (he's 39) and really really really boring because he's afraid of absolutely everything. Although the book tries to show that she has all these simple and true insights about life and adulthood thanks to her actually still being a child (and having had a troubled childhood where she had to just figure things out by observation instead of having adults to model for her), the whole thing is written in a choppy, told-you-so tone that is highly grating. Again, more like a 13-year-old social media tone.

My bigger issue with the book was that it was highly repetitive and centered on trauma, as if the worse these kids' lives were, the more real and meaningful their stories could be. For some reason, Ted/the author tells the story with lots of dramatic foreshadowing and deliberate hiding of information, so that you're expecting to be building up to a huge, dramatic, painful ending with the deaths of everybody involved (except Ted of course) - so when we finally get to the hometown to hear the end of the story, it's a bit of a letdown. Why was he so cagey about the whole thing? Why was this such a pivotal summer in his memories? It just didn't make sense, which left me with the feeling that the author really just wanted to imagine various modes of childhood trauma and throw them all together with a bunch of one-liners that sound insightful.

Each one of the kids involved has a hard, traumatic backstory and comes from a broken family (or no family at all, in Louisa's case). Of course we've already talked about Louisa, orphaned at age 5 and shuffled around in the foster care system through apparently abusive or at best neglectful homes. Ted, the narrator, is a gay man who, as mentioned, is afraid of everything. His father died of cancer when he was a teen, leaving him with just an older brother who beat him up instead of defending him, and a mother who was often absent since she had to work to take care of everyone. Joar lives with a loving mother who lacks basic knowledge and common sense, and an alcoholic father who regularly beats his wife and son (and spends all his money on alcohol), so that Joar doesn't really know how to approach the world except through violence. Ali (not her real name) lives with her father, who drinks and parties through life, borrowing money he can't pay back and exposing her to sexual assault through the friends he brings home. And the artist, who doesn't get a name until the last 100 pages of the book (and again, it's not clear why it was a secret... there is really no reason given for not revealing his name until the end, and why oh why would his best friend not talk about him by his name in the first 350 pages while he's telling the story??), is autistic or in some other way just "different" from all the other kids in a way that neither of his parents accept; his father essentially rejects him, and his mother self-medicates with alcohol and pills, leading the artist to be deeply depressed and hooked on pain meds himself.

The kids all have each other, but they are fully defined, as characters, by their trauma. Their friendship mostly consists of being loud and rude, being violent with each other, farting and laughing about it, mocking each other, and occasionally getting into "shenanigans" like stealing bicycles, breaking into various places, driving without a license, or riding shopping carts down hills - but hey, they have really good reasons and noble intentions for doing all those things, and they have tragic backstories, so they're still good, lovable kids, and if we can't see that it's because we're too adult to have their perspective, right?

I kept reading because I kept hoping that all the overdone metaphors, all the saccharine insights, all the blunt, ballsy, and not-as-ironic-as-they-wanted-to-be one-liners would coalesce into something that transcended the presentation... but it really never did. What a disappointment.