Reflections on Beartown by Fredrick Backman
Beartown by Fredrik Backman is a very good read.
This is a huge generalization, but I've noticed something about serious fiction of late. I've been reading novels for a long time. I was in high school in the seventies; I did my undergrad degree in Literature in the early eighties. The university I attended was old school, which is to say, we studied old books -- the authors were a lot of dead, white guys. Even in the modern lit courses -- Children's Literature, "Modern" Literature, and American Literature to name a few -- the books we read were old.
All this is a prelude to saying that most old classic novels I've read don't end well. Call it a bent toward tragedy as a preferred dramatic disposition; call it, later, a leaning toward existentialism, realism or pessimism; the point is, many old/classic novels don't end happily-ever-after.
Fast forward several decades in my life and I've noticed a new trend in modern serious literature. It tends to go down the same road as a lot of its predecessor classics: feels like, looks like, smells like, reads like a tragedy. But then something changes. Enter that Hollywood moment when someone -- or several someones -- stand up and do the right thing. The few good men trope.
In fact, the cynic in me says that some authors writing serious literature today are consciously or subconsciously angling for some film producer to come along and offer big bucks for the movie rights.*
Without giving any spoilers, that's my main complaint about Beartown: the feel-good Hollywood moments which, for me, soften the very real, hard-hitting and sad moments in the novel.
Now, to speak out of the other side of my mouth :)
I remember years ago being a supply teacher for a grade ten history class. I recall doing the best I could without having a history background. When the head of the history department learned that I had an English lit background, we had a conversation that went something like this:
"Why does most literature -- at least the stuff we teach in high schools -- end with people dying? Why can't there be happy literature?" The sentiment was not unlike that which I would hear for many years to come from students and colleagues. I remember fumbling around with some talk of the highest form of literature, tragedy, Shakespeare, Aristotle, blah blah blah. History teacher guy wasn't buying it.
Fast forward to the two thousands in secondary education. The push now in English -- or literature or language arts, depending on your jurisdiction -- is to steer away for the cannon of classics and to introduce more modern, student accessible, feel-good books. Which brings me to Beartown.
The novel, Beartown by Fredrik Backman, is a bit coming of age, a bit portrait of a small hockey town in Sweden and a bit study in good and evil -- it's also very much about parenting (see many of the quotes below). It doesn't do any of the above better than its fellows in the genre necessarily but, given the strong -- sometimes beautiful sometimes haunting -- prose and characterization, this is one of the best books I've read in a while. I'd also say that, like the book Cloud Street, the setting is so vivid it almost acts as another character.
One of my favourite quotes from the novel is, "“You never have the sort of friends you have when you’re fifteen ever again. Even if you keep them for the rest of your life, it’s never the same as it was then.”
A huge part of the power and pain of this story comes in the form of the decisions that people make in their teens -- decisions that affect the rest of their lives. I was just telling someone yesterday that there's something special about well written YA and/or children's literature. There's a deep universal connection that we all make to the innocence of youth. It's a longing for something lost.
I think, in part, it's what Jesus was on about in the gospels when he said that unless we become like one of these (the children) we can't/won't inherit/see the Kingdom of God. And later, when Nicodemus -- a pharisee and part of the established religious elite -- sees something special in Jesus but is afraid of his contemporaries, he goes to see Jesus in the cover of night. Jesus gives him the famous and much misunderstood words: "unless one becomes born again one cannot see the Kingdom of God."
In case you're thinking, What's up with the religious, totally unrelated hard left? The thing about "the Kingdom of God" is that, as I see it, it's God's preferred vision of what the world should be: aka how we should treat each other, ourselves and our environment. Hence the prayer, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Put differently, it's a cry to peel away the layers of our adultness with all their trappings of vice, hate, violence and self loathing and to find the innocence of the children we once were.
Other great quotes from the novel:
“Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn't through love, because love is hard, It makes demands. Hate is simple. So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that's easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe - comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy.”
“Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward.”
“It doesn't take long to persuade each other to stop seeing a person as a person. And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.”
"Words are not small things.”
“The love a parent feels for a child is strange. There is a starting point to our love for everyone else, but not this person. This one we have always loved, we loved them before they even existed. No matter how well prepared they are, all moms and dads experience a moment of total shock, when the tidal wave of feelings first washed through them, knocking them off their feet. It's incomprehensible because there's nothing to compare it to. It's like trying to describe sand between your toes or snowflakes on your tongue to someone who's lived their whole life in a dark room. It sends the soul flying.”
“Bitterness can be corrosive. It can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes.”
“It doesn’t take a lot to be able to let go of your child. It takes everything.”
“Anything that grows closely enough to what it loves will eventually share the same roots. We can talk about loss, we can treat it and give it time, but biology still forces us to live according to certain rules: plants that are split down the middle don't heal, they die.”
“Difficult questions, simple answers. What is a community?...It is the sum total of our choices.”
“There are two things that are particularly good at reminding us how old we are: children and sports.”
“Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone...”
More quotes? Go here:
Or, better, yet: read the book :)
_________________________________
* And, yes indeed, the makers of the Swedish/Danish television show The Bridge have purchased the rights and are planning a made-for-TV mini series of Beartown.
This is a huge generalization, but I've noticed something about serious fiction of late. I've been reading novels for a long time. I was in high school in the seventies; I did my undergrad degree in Literature in the early eighties. The university I attended was old school, which is to say, we studied old books -- the authors were a lot of dead, white guys. Even in the modern lit courses -- Children's Literature, "Modern" Literature, and American Literature to name a few -- the books we read were old.
All this is a prelude to saying that most old classic novels I've read don't end well. Call it a bent toward tragedy as a preferred dramatic disposition; call it, later, a leaning toward existentialism, realism or pessimism; the point is, many old/classic novels don't end happily-ever-after.
Fast forward several decades in my life and I've noticed a new trend in modern serious literature. It tends to go down the same road as a lot of its predecessor classics: feels like, looks like, smells like, reads like a tragedy. But then something changes. Enter that Hollywood moment when someone -- or several someones -- stand up and do the right thing. The few good men trope.
In fact, the cynic in me says that some authors writing serious literature today are consciously or subconsciously angling for some film producer to come along and offer big bucks for the movie rights.*
Without giving any spoilers, that's my main complaint about Beartown: the feel-good Hollywood moments which, for me, soften the very real, hard-hitting and sad moments in the novel.
Now, to speak out of the other side of my mouth :)
I remember years ago being a supply teacher for a grade ten history class. I recall doing the best I could without having a history background. When the head of the history department learned that I had an English lit background, we had a conversation that went something like this:
"Why does most literature -- at least the stuff we teach in high schools -- end with people dying? Why can't there be happy literature?" The sentiment was not unlike that which I would hear for many years to come from students and colleagues. I remember fumbling around with some talk of the highest form of literature, tragedy, Shakespeare, Aristotle, blah blah blah. History teacher guy wasn't buying it.
Fast forward to the two thousands in secondary education. The push now in English -- or literature or language arts, depending on your jurisdiction -- is to steer away for the cannon of classics and to introduce more modern, student accessible, feel-good books. Which brings me to Beartown.
The novel, Beartown by Fredrik Backman, is a bit coming of age, a bit portrait of a small hockey town in Sweden and a bit study in good and evil -- it's also very much about parenting (see many of the quotes below). It doesn't do any of the above better than its fellows in the genre necessarily but, given the strong -- sometimes beautiful sometimes haunting -- prose and characterization, this is one of the best books I've read in a while. I'd also say that, like the book Cloud Street, the setting is so vivid it almost acts as another character.
One of my favourite quotes from the novel is, "“You never have the sort of friends you have when you’re fifteen ever again. Even if you keep them for the rest of your life, it’s never the same as it was then.”
A huge part of the power and pain of this story comes in the form of the decisions that people make in their teens -- decisions that affect the rest of their lives. I was just telling someone yesterday that there's something special about well written YA and/or children's literature. There's a deep universal connection that we all make to the innocence of youth. It's a longing for something lost.
I think, in part, it's what Jesus was on about in the gospels when he said that unless we become like one of these (the children) we can't/won't inherit/see the Kingdom of God. And later, when Nicodemus -- a pharisee and part of the established religious elite -- sees something special in Jesus but is afraid of his contemporaries, he goes to see Jesus in the cover of night. Jesus gives him the famous and much misunderstood words: "unless one becomes born again one cannot see the Kingdom of God."
In case you're thinking, What's up with the religious, totally unrelated hard left? The thing about "the Kingdom of God" is that, as I see it, it's God's preferred vision of what the world should be: aka how we should treat each other, ourselves and our environment. Hence the prayer, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Put differently, it's a cry to peel away the layers of our adultness with all their trappings of vice, hate, violence and self loathing and to find the innocence of the children we once were.
Other great quotes from the novel:
“Hate can be a deeply stimulating emotion. The world becomes easier to understand and much less terrifying if you divide everything and everyone into friends and enemies, we and they, good and evil. The easiest way to unite a group isn't through love, because love is hard, It makes demands. Hate is simple. So the first thing that happens in a conflict is that we choose a side, because that's easier than trying to hold two thoughts in our heads at the same time. The second thing that happens is that we seek out facts that confirm what we want to believe - comforting facts, ones that permit life to go on as normal. The third is that we dehumanize our enemy.”
“Everyone has a thousand wishes before a tragedy, but just one afterward.”
“It doesn't take long to persuade each other to stop seeing a person as a person. And when enough people are quiet for long enough, a handful of voices can give the impression that everyone is screaming.”
"Words are not small things.”
“The love a parent feels for a child is strange. There is a starting point to our love for everyone else, but not this person. This one we have always loved, we loved them before they even existed. No matter how well prepared they are, all moms and dads experience a moment of total shock, when the tidal wave of feelings first washed through them, knocking them off their feet. It's incomprehensible because there's nothing to compare it to. It's like trying to describe sand between your toes or snowflakes on your tongue to someone who's lived their whole life in a dark room. It sends the soul flying.”
“Bitterness can be corrosive. It can rewrite your memories as if it were scrubbing a crime scene clean, until in the end you only remember what suits you of its causes.”
“It doesn’t take a lot to be able to let go of your child. It takes everything.”
“Anything that grows closely enough to what it loves will eventually share the same roots. We can talk about loss, we can treat it and give it time, but biology still forces us to live according to certain rules: plants that are split down the middle don't heal, they die.”
“Difficult questions, simple answers. What is a community?...It is the sum total of our choices.”
“There are two things that are particularly good at reminding us how old we are: children and sports.”
“Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone...”
More quotes? Go here:
Or, better, yet: read the book :)
_________________________________
* And, yes indeed, the makers of the Swedish/Danish television show The Bridge have purchased the rights and are planning a made-for-TV mini series of Beartown.
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