Things My Son Needs to Know about the World by Fredrik Backman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[...] I know all kids sooner or later reach a point in their lives where they realize that their dads aren't actually superheroes. [...] I just wish for it to take as long as possible. [...] Scared of the day when I lose my place in your life. [...] That feeling of being left out. The awkwardness. The loneliness."

Fredrik Backman's Things My Son Needs to Know about the World comes highly recommended by my Goodreads friend, Bozena Pruska (note the similarity of last names, what a coincidence!), who rated the book with her rare 5 stars. Although in real life I agree with almost everything she says and does (I better do or else...), I will allow myself to have a slightly differing opinion here. Let me try to explain, thus avoiding Ms. Pruska's wrath.

True, it is a charming and sweet book about being a father of a very young son. It is full of non-trivial wisdom about life. One can find poignant, deeply moving passages such as the one whose fragments are shown above in the epigraph. I remember my fear when many, many years ago I realized that I would lose my place in my daughter's life. I believe that everybody who has ever been a parent of a young child will relate to at least some of Mr. Backman's writing, and most parents will relate to a lot of it.

Yet to me, the book has too many "paint-by-numbers" fragments, jokes with easy targets, "low-hanging comedic fruit" like

"Your grandpa was here over the weekend and he installed those little child safety locks all over the kitchen.
The result is that it now takes you about fifteen seconds to get into a cupboard. And it takes me half an hour."

The whole thing has a little of that soap-opera kind of feeling, where we expect to hear canned laughter after each fragment. Only just a little, though; there is enough seriousness, enough mature psychological content that transcends anything that one can ever see on TV.

I totally love the chapter titled What You Need to Know about Being a Man. Despite the macho title it is really a study on generational continuity, on how the author's father's generation is different from his own and how this fact never changes, from generation to generation. Almost like a companion to Heraclitus' famous quote that "the only constant in life is change." Here we have something to the effect "Things change in unchanging ways."

Most of the book is beautifully written and well translated too, from Swedish. The beginning, the first two pages, where the author apologizes to his son for "everything [he's] going to do over the next eighteen or so years" is deeply moving as is the passage from which I extracted snippets for the epigraph. These two passages alone are worth the price of the book. Many parents will shed tears reading these passages.

Four stars.

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