WTF WAS THAT. DNF 50%

I really did try giving it the benefit of the doubt since I have largely liked Backman’s books in the past. But I fear I have diverged from his brand of sentimentalism and this will be my last book of his.

And I don’t rate books I don’t finish but this made me livid.

Why did it try so hard to be charming? Everything came across as faux deep and insufferably saccharine. Oversaturated is an understatement. Every single metaphor was trite and full of tumblr-esque platitudes.

Here are some grating examples:

“our teenage years have to simultaneously be the brightest light and the darkest depths, because that's how we learn to figure out our horizons.”

“The artist? He was good at seeing the beauty in everything, that happens if you're no good at seeing it in yourself.”

“Painted by someone who must have been completely beaten to pieces inside, because no one could hold a brush so carefully otherwise, no one could paint friendship like this without first having been a completely lonely child.”

“We're a bunch of lonely apes on a rock in the universe, our breath consists of eighty percent nitrogen, twenty percent oxygen, and one hundred percent anxiety.”

“[…] tell stupid little stories. Or to paint big paint-ings, the biggest you can manage, and to try to learn to whisper in color. To look for a way to show other people: this was me, these were my humans, these were our farts. These were our bodies, and they were small, far too small because they couldn't contain all our love.”

“People always said he was extraordinary, but he was just like everyone else, at the end of his life he only wished for what almost all of us wish for: to have our childhood summers back.”

“Her laugh sounded like a swarm of insects.”

“We were laughing in the painting [because] someone had farted. You said you couldn't understand how anyone could paint ... laughter. That's because it was Ali's laugh he painted."