My Friends: Book Review

Book title: My Friends Book author: Fredrik Backman

Louisa, 14, breaks into an art gallery full of expensive paintings and rich people wanting to invest in expensive paintings… With a puzzling start, we delve into Backman’s latest novel. The beginning of the novel seemed to me like that of Anxious People. A boom.

Slowly we meet the teenagers on the cover of the book, swimming in the ocean—the friends of My Friends. The story runs in parallel in two times and places. 25 years ago, the friends lived in a small town, in a neighborhood where fathers worked at the harbor, adults had their own darkness, and the friends were left with each other to protect themselves. The story setting reminded me of Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, as in both the stories, bottles or alcoholism played a big part shaping the  childhood of the kids.

Amidst the chaos of life and the tie of friendship, art is born—a painting of friends, which some people mistake for the painting of a sea, which will be displayed in the exhibitions, and maybe someone will break into one of them.

My Friends is a beautiful story of friendship, childhood struggles and of art. Although I admired the book, I could not enjoy it fully. I laughed, I felt for the characters, but what made me a bit irritated is—the bits of the story and bits of the prose seemed rendered from Backman’s other writing. Take this prose “Oh, how he laughed”, I think I read/listened to this in his other books. Take the character selection from the book—Ted was grumpy like Ove, I could predict the other ones as well. These are not at all negative aspects of a novel. The book and the characters are not plainly predictable, but reading all the books of Backman, my head felt like a pattern matching tool who is scoring the similarity of the book with the others. And I was probably looking for more fresh materials here.

I switched between my kindle copy and audible version. The audible narration sounded all too similar like any other books by Backman.

If you have picked up Backman, I would encourage you to read this. But if you have read all his books, and loved them like me, I am interested to know your take on this one.

My highlights from the book