My Friends, a Book Review

 

My Friends

by

Fredrik Bachman

Back on May 1, I started to write a post about bibliotherapy. Couldn't write it because I was too busy trying to use it. I have been too much with the world. Too much reading. Too much reading of the news and the explanations of the news and the opinions of the news and the speculations of the news.

Luckily, I have a friend who is a retired Reference Librarian. She taught me the word bibliotherapy, "a creative arts therapy that involves storytelling or the reading of specific texts. It uses an individual's relationship to the content of books and poetry and other written words as therapy."

I don't know if Fredrik Backman is an excellent writer or if Neil Smith, his translater, is.  Backman is certainly a great story teller. 

Whatever. 

Backman (or Smith) writes in my rhythms, and this book is the life-saving therapy I need right now.

"The old woman hasn't noticed Louisa yet, that's part of the plan." And here we have the perfect first sentence which, as my writing teacher taught me, is so important to hook the reader. However, in My Friends, it is the first line of the second chapter. Never mind. I was hooked when I saw the author's name. 

"For someone who's surprisingly tall, Louisa is suprisingly good at being invisible. The secret to that is knowing that you don't mean anything to anyone. That you're worthless." 

"The woman, who feels very important and is therefore very visible.... 'Look Charles! Apparently they let anyone in here these days, even those vulgar new-money social climbers. Look at them! No taste. No style.'" she says.

"The richer people like her get, the fewer things they like, until eventually they become so rich that they even hate other rich people, and that's the only thing Louisa almost likes about them." And, thus, Backman has told us about Louisa and her world. And me and mine.

"No one notices when Louisa opens the backpack full of cans of spray paint. No one notics when she ducks under the rope and walks closer to the painting."

Ah, yes. The painting. The one titled The One of the Sea.

Backman tells us the painting is not valuable itself. A picture of three teenagers at the end of a pier. But, it's a picture that has hung on white walls in prestigious galleries and is now offered in a high dollar auction. "In their world it isn't the artist who should be admired, it's the owner, because only something which has a price can have any value. That's why the children on the painting are so important that they're protected by guards, but the children on the pier in real life could die without anyone even caring."

Louisa escapes those guards and runs into the artist. The connection is made. And the story begins.

In my house, I am surrounded by art: paintings and photos and quilts and needle work; pottery and ceramics; words, framed and bound.

I do not know and do not want to know how much any of those pieces is actually worth in dollars. That is a great fear for me, that any of them would be worth more than I could afford to keep.

Some are by my brother and son and daughter and son-in-law. Some are gifts from people who know the art is important to me. Some I've purchased myself when I could afford it -- from galleries, from street art shows, from a man painting in the park. All of it means something to me -- mostly that there are people in this wide, strange world of humanity who communicated to me through their art that they and I share an understanding of this world. An understanding, perhaps uncommon among people of wealth and influence who have and know more than I do. 

In this book, one of those childhood friends on the pier tells Louisa the story of that painting, knowing she'll "get it."

It's a hard book to read. The words are easy to understand, but the feelings are hard to feel.

Backman's books, like those of certain other writers, show me that I'll never write a "great" novel. And I am so glad they have and continue to do. Their art helps keep me sane and willing to continue on.