Beartown: worth a read
Title: Beartown
Author: Fredrik Backman; translated by Neil Smith
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 415
My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Who will like it? For all my hockey fans out there, this one’s for you. For anyone who doesn’t know much about the game, read the book and you’ll find how hockey for some is larger than life itself — outside the rink, it’s a game of power, influence, loyalty, sacrifice, and courage all at the same time, making its culture so potent.
Backman gives life to this small hockey town. There’s static in the air, buzzing with electricity, although the story is set in a dying town where the trees are encroaching and threatening to swallow the town whole and everyone with it. Beartown feels like a confined room with such extreme energy and potential that everyone is watching for the moment when someone might light a single spark, and the town is just waiting for the entire room to combust into scorching flames in a silent explosion. For Beartown, that deafening spark is hockey.
The moment they win, the crowd erupts and “a moment ago they were all atheists. None of them is now.” The dedication these people have for hockey in this small town is colossal, and saying “it’s just a game” or just “a win” or “a loss” is a betraying understatement. The General Manager of the club, Peter, moved his entire family from Canada to revive this town. The entire town, with levers of sponsors, investors, and businessmen place their wealth and reputation on the line, expectant that this boys’ hockey team can bring life back to the town for the world to see Beartown more than a recluse, secluded, dying ground populated by a group of nobodies.
The dedication everyone has for the team, placing team before individual always, whether the GM, junior coach, or each player, willing to give an arm and a leg and ribcages and multiple teeth for the team, and spending more time in the rink than in daylight, totalling over 80 hours a week in the rink while a full-time job is 40 hours — this culture of winning is so contagious and exhilarating. It almost reminds me of years ago on my robotics team, how dedicated my coach (and everyone else) was to our team. Our lead programmer camped out at our coach’s house on Sundays programming from morning to evening, other times team members didn’t see the light of day working dawn to dusk at Makerspace. On long drives to Washington state, we laughed at robotics being hockey with “gracious professionalism”.
But this story is equally about the town surrounding hockey as the thrill of hockey itself and. It is about how our society functions, and how we protect our children as parents, and what we choose when our morality comes to odds with what we love passionately with our whole beings. This story is about the fracturing, merging, building, and breaking of friendships, and how we can love something or someone without loving every single instant of them. We leverage off of each other and in the end, not everyone chooses the good thing over the evil thing, and trauma and guilt and just devout disbelief can challenge our most fundamental ways of life, but we go on and life goes on.
“Sports creates complicated men, proud enough to refuse to admit their mistakes, but humble enough always to put their team first.” (p.58)
This goes for so many sports — for hockey, the culture is infectious, but as the race for EuroCup is happening right now, millions and millions of fans are revving up to cheer on teams that have a special place in their hearts. Sometimes, the infectious energy goes out of hand, like when Andres Escobar scored an own-goal in the 1994 FIFA World Cup match with Columbia playing the U.S., and was shot to his death by fans. We hope the German fans treat Mats Hummels with kindness.
Fredrik Backman writes so beautifully well. He eases us the reader in, blurring suspense and emotion, and each of his sentences is ripe with unique expressions rather than washed-out figures of speech. Between his effortless transitions, he introduces each character with so much life that they are not ubiquitous or lacklustre characters but real people. Nobody and yet everybody is the lead character — whether the small girl Maya, her gentle and enduring father, her relentless “wolf” mother, Kevin, the boy Beartown depends on, or Amat and Fatima, discriminated while they hold onto their own principles. Following each character feels like watching a TV show with millions of flashbacks and details that make up all of these people. Beartown is not about plot twists or strange surprises, it’s about how Backman builds the town so vividly that the reader submerges in every emotion of every character. There is not defining climactic moment, but Backman foreshadows and outlines and builds up the soul of Beartown with more pages of backstory and nostalgia than spur-of-the-moment descriptions, using language in such idiosyncratic ways that make you yearn to learn more about the town and its people. Almost like “the Princess and the Pea”, Backman provides an intense but simple plot (the pea) and many more layers of backstory and memories (mattresses) laid on top of another. There’s only so much pea and so much more layers of mattresses, but what the heck all of the mattresses are unique and interesting and compelling and perfect. It’s necessary to have these mattresses layered to reach the heights this novel has reached for me.
