Beartown is the third Fredrik Backman novel I’ve read, and at this point, I’m convinced that he is one of a master of fiction. While Anxious People is full of quirky warmth and witty chaos, and My Friends navigates complicated emotions and human tenderness, Beartown has its own charm. It’s about community, pressure, and the brutal honesty of adolescence.

Backman’s writing has always pulled me in effortlessly. The town of Beartown, with ice hockey as its pride, breathes like a character of its own. The story feels cold, raw, and painfully real. There are many characters, each with vivid personalities that color the narrative, and despite the number of them, Backman makes it easy to care, or at least understand them.

You can feel the thrill of every hockey match, the weight of every silence, the power of unspoken rules. The emotions are gripping, not in a loud, dramatic way, but in a slow, suffocating way that mirrors reality too closely.

Along the reading experience, I found many intriguing lines some of them quietly reflective, such as:

“Places like this always have to pin their hopes for the future on young people. They’re the only ones who don’t remember that things actually used to be better.”

The more I read, the more I felt like Beartown was talking about that town as well as it was talking about us. About how adults, already exhausted and unsure, keep placing their hopes on the younger generation, telling them the future is theirs to build. Yet deep down, we know we’re handing them a world that’s heavier than ever: harsher competition, a planet in decline, systems on the verge of collapse. We tell them to work hard, to dream big, to be good, as if those things are still guarantees. Are they?

“You can’t live in this town, Maya, you can only survive it.”

This part stayed with me longer than expected. Because isn’t that true for many of us too? Some of us aren’t really living, just surviving. Moving through days in a muted, controlled rhythm, in survival mode without even realizing it. Functioning, but not fully alive.

“Community is the fact that we work toward the same goal, that we accept our respective roles in order to reach it. Values is the fact that we trust each other. That we love each other.” David thought about that for a long while before asking: “What about culture, then?” Sune looked more serious, choosing his words carefully. In the end he said: “For me, culture is as much about what we encourage as what we actually permit.”

It also made me reflect on the kind of society we exist in today, one that glorifies ambition, encourages us to reach higher, be more, move faster, yet quietly allows so little room to actually live. To fail. To rest. Communities feel fragile. Values feel blurred. There’s constant pressure, but not always purpose.

My Favorite Bits

• “Never trust people who don’t have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason.”

• If you are honest, people may deceive you. Be honest anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfishness. Be kind anyway. All the good you do today will be forgotten by others tomorrow. Do good anyway.

• What you create, others can destroy. Create anyway. Because in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and anyone else anyway.

• “Talent is like letting two balloons up into the air: the most interesting thing isn’t watching which one climbing fastest, but which one has the longest string.”

• All adults have days when we feel completely drained. When we no longer know quite what we spend so much time fighting for, when reality and everyday worries overwhelm us and we wonder how.

• Good workers aren’t enough on their own, someone needs to have big ideas as well. Collectives only work if they’re built around stars.

• “The only thing the sport gives us are moments. But what the hell is life, Peter, apart from moments?”

• Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone, there’s always someone who’s freezing.

• Religion is something between you and other people; it’s full of interpretations and theories and options. But faith.. that’s just between you and God.

• People sometimes say that sorrow is mental but longing is physical. One is a wound, the other an amputated limb, a withered petal compared to a snapped stem. 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 love according to certain rules: plants that are split down the middle don’t heal, they die.

• “For me, culture is as much about what we encourage as what we actually permit.” David asked what he meant by that, and Sune replied: “That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with.”

• Success demands that we see beyond ourselves.

• 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. There are many ways of doing that, but none is easier than taking her name away from her.

• What is a community? It is the sum total of our choices.

• Sometimes life doesn’t let you choose your battles. Just the company you keep.

• There are few words that are harder to explain than “loyalty.” It’s always regarded as a positive characteristic, because a lot of people would say that many of the best things people do for each other occur precisely because of loyalty. The only problem is that many of the very worst things we do to each other occur because of the same thing.

• All their lives, girls are told that the only thing they need to do is their best. That that will be enough, as long as they give everything they’ve got. When they themselves become mothers, they promise their daughters that it’s true, that if we just do as well as we can, if we’re honest and work hard, look after our family and love each other, then everything will be all right. Everything will be fine, there’s nothing to be frightened of. Children need the lie to be brave enough to sleep in their beds; parents need it to be able to get up the next morning.

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Author: Fredrik Backman
Publication date: 15 September 2016
Number of pages: 432 pages

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