If I am to rate a book 5 stars, it needs to be a mental ambrosia to which I can look back in awe. I must remember it, and believe that it has changed my worldview in some meaningful regard, because of the way it has made me think or feel over some period of time which has continued even after I turned the last page. If a book does not meet these standards one year after I have read it, for example if I cannot remember the main plot points, I may retroactively downgrade it because to me that means I have not been compelled to reflect on it enough. I do not think I could ever forget an ascension of one Edmond Dantès, an insular religion centered around lies and boko-maru, or a broken man’s whispered “timshel,” because the scenes and notions have been in my mind for all these years, and my beliefs have coalesced around those thought processes, and resultantly my character has become those books. These are those books. These are my character.
Why review?
Because a rating isn’t enough, not for a book like East of Eden. A rating alone reduces everything, the ideas and impressions, to a single number, good or bad or just okay, a lone categorical variable, so that when people inquire about my response to the book, that will be the only thing they see. I want them (and me in the future) to see more; one value cannot contain everything I feel about David Foster Wallace. If I want to clearly demonstrate the substance and thought that went into my numerical decision, I must compose a review. There are other benefits as well: writing the review allows me to organize my reasoning for later use, pay homage to the resplendence of an oeuvre, and maybe even convince somebody else to pick up the book. Imagine that!
Well, this was a trip. I thought that Beartown was going to be a book about a plucky sports team persevering along a pathway to greatness, and the breathlessness that seizes a people as it follows from the sidelines. I was wrong.
Will your team sink or swim? Any fan of a spectator sport will know the chest-clenching trepidation that can accompany the mere act of watching and waiting. At times, spectatorship turns otherwise calm men into raging demons. There is an empowerment that comes from being part of something greater, and the direction of that empowerment is often predicated upon sports outcomes.
And sure, this fanaticism was present in Beartown, but something else was present, too, and that something else is what made this book the unforgettable tour de force that it was. I don’t want to spoil the pivotal event, but let me say that this book is about more than just hockey (if you haven’t realized that already). And hockey is about more than just sticks on ice. Hockey is a lifestyle, a fever, a fantasy, a team. By making hockey the spirit of a microcosmic Swedish town, Backman captures all of that and more. But what do I care about a Swedish town that loves a sport I’ve never followed? you may ask. Only a whole damn lot, because this Swedish town is at its core no different than your town, or my town. Beartown is the story of all towns. And you’ll be able to empathize with everyone in it, both the bullies and the victims, thanks to Backman’s so casually realistic characterization of modern-day humans. Whether you agree with their actions or not, you will be able to see where everyone in this small town comes from and why they are what they are.
Real life is unpredictable. Beartown is too. It subverts, but in a believable way, in a way that warns you that this is how things could play out in your town with your people. And that is scary, because (as Backman spells out on the first page) things are coming to a head in Beartown, and this book is largely an account of that tragic, spiraling journey to the first-page finish line. It a story of a town winding itself into an impossible situation, or more accurately an impossible situation surfacing almost inevitably, because that is what our society and our culture have fostered. The story is very much relevant to current issues; you see circumstances in this book repeat themselves in real life every day: outspoken majorities intimidating smaller groups, competition driving people to do things they shouldn’t, racism and sexism and the stifling of kindness. Sometimes, nobody wins.
But the outcome is realistic and satisfying and hopeful, and Backman’s unassuming third-person prose is a delight to read. He will drop you into a frozen, outdoorsy town and he will not let you go. Also, he will give voices to underrepresented people in a non-hackneyed fashion. For all of this, Beartown has my sincerest endorsement.
This is the most demanding book I’ve ever read. Finishing this monster took me a year of on-and-off reading and wondering if I would ever make it through to the end. But from the start it pulled me into the world of David Foster Wallace’s trailblazing English and left me in awe. This is the kind of writing that ruins other writing for you, ruins the simplistic prose of half your childhood and brings you into a new world of literary enlightenment. My girlfriend read the first few pages of Infinite Jest and put it down after deeming it pretentious. Initially I took offense, but after some thought I had to agree. It is pretentious. DFW uses complicated words and convoluted constructions and there’s a simpler way to express everything he writes but that would lose the heart of it, the utter sublimity of his work. He’s precise in a long-winded way. I’m sure DFW could indict addictive substances with half the space and none of the weird words, but if he did we would all miss out on a multifaceted torrent of perfectly-phrased prose, prose which requires that you hang onto every single word and read slower than you ever have but that is worth it nonetheless if you value melody and propriety to any degree. The discovery of DFW marks a shift for me in that it’s not really fiction/nonfiction I read primarily for the plot – it’s not The Count of Monte Cristo. Of course the stories and the ideas are great too, but for me the best part is the writing. I didn’t know what was going on in half of the Infinite Jest chapters, and I’m not sure if it was because they were only excerpts or I’m just an idiot, but it didn’t matter because his characterization of people and places and theses were so mindblowingly vivid that I was hooked anyway (I also liked e.g. “The Depressed Person” for this).
Every time I set this book down, I was inspired to write again. DFW reinvented English for me, made it something I never knew it was, and I will probably now spend my life longing to be able to command the English language like DFW does in his maximalist streams of consciousness.
A note about the actual book: this is a collection of some of DFW’s greatest compositions. A lot of them are about messed-up people or depressing subjects. Sometimes literally: it starts with a story about depression. So just be warned in case you don’t like reading about stuff like that.
tl;drSome of the best, most beautiful, and most high-effort reading I’ve ever experienced.