Anxious People

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman
 

By now, if you read this blog or the reviews I post you will know I am completely enamored with Fredrik Backman’s books. He just gets it. He gets us. Somehow he gets inside and perfectly portrays all different kinds of people, many of them in my age range and he holds up a mirror and confirms we are who we are. Sometimes I laugh at a phrase or description, sometimes I shaky my head and sometimes I just say aloud to the page, “How did you know? You’re not this old!”

When Anxious People was offered as an advance I tried to hold off reading it as long as I could, but it’s like standing me in front of a case of fresh baked pastries and telling me to wait. I want it. I want it all and I want it now. If I cave in, then it’s done and gone. But that’s not quite what happened to this book. I read it. Then I read it again. Then I went back and read the first few pages again because in the second paragraph he declares we are idiots. I honed in on his explanation and of course, he was right on.

I am not supposed to quote from advance review copies but in this case the publisher can delete this if they want to. It explains these last few months so well, even if the book was written well before the Covid thing changed everything. “It’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is...” “there’s such an unbelievable amount that we’re all supposed to be able to cope with these days..” and then he lists the things we have to know just to survive and how insanely unprepared we are to do that. And all I could think of was, after being locked down this past year, how intolerable I find other people. I’ve become out of practice with dealing. I’ve become so much more impatient – and I don’t count patience as one of my virtues to begin with. Mr. Backman declaring us idiots spoke to me and I was only to the second paragraph. Idiots indeed.

There’s a desperate person who jumps off a bridge, forever changing the lives of the people who saw it happen. There’s a desperate person who attempts to rob a bank and ridiculously bungles the job just because the robber didn’t realize the bank was a cashless bank. But the die had been cast.

There’s a whole apartment full of desperate people who are looking to live in the apartment.

Someone wants to buy the apartment so it can be renovated and sold, someone else doesn’t. Someone else just wants a home for the new baby. Someone else who is there just for curiosity. Toss in the real estate agent and a man hiding in the bathroom in his underwear and eventually you have eight anxious people in one place all trying to cope. There are some who are connected through the suicide but don’t realize it until they do. These desperate people are anxious in their own lives and now they are hostages.

As with all of Mr. Backman’s books, the people you start out with aren’t the ones you end up with. They change, they adapt, they cope and show us that we can, too.