Book Reviews

These wild and precious lives.

The Swedish writer Fredrik Backman is the author of the international bestseller, A Man Called Ove (2012). His wry, dry Nordic humor is again on display in his latest novel, titled simply My Friends. It’s a celebration of the healing, redemptive qualities of art and friendship.

Louisa, an eighteen-year-old aspiring artist and social outcast, is fascinated by a world-famous painting—a picture of the sea with three young people sitting at the end of a long pier—and she seeks to learn the story behind it.

She meets Ted, one of the three teens in the painting who’s now an adult. As her grumpy guide, he slowly unwinds the tale of them and of their friend, “the artist,” who painted the picture. (Like Ove, Ted is one of those lovable curmudgeons Backman does so well). Louisa returns with him to the scene of the painting and learns what became of the four teenagers.

With homes defined by abuse, grief, and loss, their friendship was a refuge from the brutality and bleakness of their lives, when “they lay on the pier and drank cheap sodas and watched the sunset for free.” They were fourteen, a magical time of terrible jokes and silly adventures and fights bringing them close to not speaking to each other ever again, only to return the next day the best of friends.

At the heart of the story is the gifted and disturbed teen artist, his life both tormented and made transcendent by “art that is a joy so overwhelming you almost can’t bear it.”  (“There’s something very wrong with him, he wants to say, and the only time he doesn’t hate himself is when he’s painting…That’s the only time he ever feels like himself.” Perhaps not surprising, Backman writes in an afterword, “Telling stories is the only time I really like myself.”)

The novel has a timeless, fable-like quality. We don’t know where it takes place, or in what age—there are trains and cars, so it’s a modern setting—but it has a Once-upon-a-time feel to it. And as with all fables, there are little drops of wisdom dispensed along the way which help the characters (and the readers) make it through the often daunting and lonely experience of living.

One of these is the Mary Oliver poem, “The Summer Day,” which ends Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?

In this modern fable on art and friendship, Backman reminds us that, whatever our age, we have one wild and precious life, and asks “What do you plan to do with it?”