Confession: I Read the Most Popular Book on Goodreads and Cried My Eyes Out

My Friends is brimming with so many themes I could write a dissertation. Art and friendship. Grief and death. Childhood, growing up. Family. What I loved about A Man Called Ove, and what Backman does again well, is the prose. He is funny without being deprecating, delivering a plethora of aphorisms about life, and, in this case, the power of art, without making it feel cliché or cringe. It seems nearly every page is brimming with some melancholic observation that is funny, only because I know it’s true. Example: “Little children think teenagers are the best humans, and teenagers think teenagers are the best humans, the only people who don’t think that teenagers are the best humans are adults. Which is obviously because adults are the worst kind of humans.”

I found Louisa to be a particularly interesting character. She quickly reminded me of Stevens from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. Both read as protagonists who are possibly on the spectrum, and Backman and Ishiguro render them with compassion, humor, clarity and agency. Louisa’s internal monologue is resilient, but because she lacks a filter, it is comical—even to herself. 

What most cued all my tears was the way Backman, through each character, spoke of the power of art as a way to save a soul. Through the story of Ted, C.Jat and their childhood friends comes a scathing critique of the world’s attempt to industrialize the act of creation and taint it with money. It’s an ode to those who dare to create, no matter where they come from, no matter how unknown. Backman puts it this way: “Art doesn’t require training, dear child, art just needs friends.”