Not too much to say about this one outside of the fact that I should have DNFed this one instead of proceeding. I think I just have to deal with the fact that the only book of Backman’s that I liked was A Man Named Ove. And everything else has been pretty much misses for me. My Friends had a lot going on and it was just too much after a while. There was so much repetitiveness, so many stops and starts to telling a story. Too many sentences/comments/stories dealing with farts (yes I am serious). And everything felt way too precious and I felt aggravated. A lot of this book deals with child abuse, but it felt like Backman was trying to pretty it up by having one of the kids make good though we know in the end he didn’t really. And the rest of the ‘friends’ in this story didn’t seem to end up anywhere great. I felt let down in the end and wanted to know what I was supposed to take away from this story.
My Friends follows 17 (about to turn 18) year old Louisa. Louisa is determined to see a painting that she has seen since she was a child. It reminds her of the mother that was never there for her and also connects Louisa to her friend Fish. But apparently adults (who Backman says repeatedly sucks in a thousand different ways in this book) take her for an activist who is out to damage the painting. And Louisa flees and ends up running into and knocking over a man who will end up changing her life (the artist of the painting C Jat). The book follows Louisa as she travels by train with a stranger/not a friend Ted (who was childhood friends with C Jat) as they go to where the painting was first conceived. While traveling there, Ted is forced to tell Louisa the story of how the painting came to be, who were the boys in the painting, and how they came to mean so much to C Jat.
I think I was supposed to feel emotional while reading this. Every person in this story has a sad story. And I felt exhausted by it all. There are kids who are beaten, starved, discarded, ignored, sexually abused, etc. in this story. I felt like it was just setting the stage that children, and occasionally mothers have it really bad and fathers are not that great of a thing to deal with. I also wish I could say that the little vignettes we get of the friends in the story felt realistic. It just made me think of the movie Sleepers after a while and I was wondering if anything good was ever going to happen or was it going to be despair every five minutes. I also, sad to say, did not like the character of Louisa. I felt in turns exhausted and irritated with her. She kept interrupting Ted every five minutes and honestly it just kept wrecking my reading enjoyment that she kept popping up like a really annoying bird every few pages.
The flow of the story was disjointed. We read pieces of things that happen or will happen throughout the story before we get to what you think is going to be a pivotal thing and it’s not. I just don’t get what Backman was going for. The story went on and on and due to us being in the “present” with Ted and Louisa and then with Ted telling the story and then with another character telling the story, etc. it just felt like the longest story in the world and I just didn’t care when we finally find out what happens to everyone.
- Steal – you got the book for a steal; you “stole” it from someone (not pirated, please don’t actually commit crime); a theft or heist happens; steal away. There are a lot of things stolen in this book, a bike, car, paintings, etc.
