ANXIOUS PEOPLE
This is a story about the frailties of human beings. The man behind the the story, pulling the strings, is Fredrik Backman, a brilliant, funny, piercingly insightful, sensitive man who was driven to write this book because a wonderful friend of his committed suicide 20 years ago and Backman hates himself because he couldn’t save him.
From a couple of clues in the novel, I’m guessing that Backman chose Jim, an older policeman in the novel, to narrate the story. Backman just kind of drops in little pieces of information that frequently fill in the character like finding a piece that fits in a jigsaw puzzle. Early in the story the narrator says that Jim had dreamed of becoming a writer and later relates that Jim is a very poor storyteller, often telling the end of the story first and then has to go back and fill in what led up to the ending. That fits the plot structure of Anxious People. It’s a bit like building “The House that Jack Built.”
The narrator is not the classic third person narrator. He is a character who interrupts the story with his views and addresses the reader directly. The reader is described by the narrator as a rational normal human being who probably wouldn’t act like these idiots.
Thus the first page lays out the essence of the story—a bank robbery, a hostage taking, a really bad idea, that human beings are idiots and have difficulty just getting through the day, knowing that another day is coming right after.
Most of the characters meet at an apartment viewing. Some of them are there because they want to buy an apartment, one is selling the apartment, one lives in the apartment, one has been hired to manipulate the sale, one comes as therapy, and one has burst into the apartment as an avenue of escape from the police.
Two characters are policemen, father and son, in this small town and are the first on the scene of the bank robbery. The son, Jack, wants to solve the crime to prove that he is just as good as law enforcement from Stockholm, who are coming to assist.
The thread that ties several of the characters together is the suicide ten years ago of a man who jumped off the bridge. One week later a young girl was standing on that same bridge, but was pulled off by a young man, who had also the week before tried to coax the man on the bridge from jumping. That young man was Jack who has been haunted by both events for 10 years.
So this is a story about suicide but it is also about other people who suffer the agonies of being human, most of whom manage to resist life’s anxieties and move on, but some of whom succumb to the angst that comes with being human.
The novel talks about Stockholmers. The term has several different meanings. It can actually mean people from Stockholm which tends to mean bureaucrats and elitists. It can mean homosexual relationships. It can mean people who “get in the way” of our happiness. It can mean to dream of somewhere bigger, and, of course, it can refer to the Stockholm syndrome when hostages bond with their captor.
There are threads that bind the characters. Suicide, child-parent relationships, relationships of couples, the frailties of humans, forgiveness, saving one another as best we can.
The bridge that the man jumps from is the same bridge Nadia climbs up on. Later Roger, an engineer who built bridges said he thought bridges brought people together. And they do. The man on the bridge, Jack, Nadia, Jack, Zara who blames herself for the man jumping from the bridge and who also sees Jack save Nadia, Nadia’s painting of a woman on a bridge and Estelle on her balcony just before the man jumps. Zara also contemplates suicide, but when she sees the bank robber’s pistol, she realizes she wants to live.
This is about saving each other a bit at a time. Jack tries to save the man on the bridge, Jack saves Nadia. Jim’s wife saves people. Man on bridge saves Zara from her eternal guilt. Anna-Lena intent to save Roger by hiring the Rabbit. Jack’s eternal efforts to save his sister. Zara saved Jack by connecting him with Nadia and saves Nadia by telling her that Jack just happened to be there but she saved herself. Jim saves the bank robber. The hostages and Jim save the bank robber.
A word I learned a few years ago is conatus. It is a philosophy that believes that all life works at ways to survive, to continue on. Estelle recalls an author who wrote “your children aren’t your children, they’re the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.” This is each person passing the baton to another from generation to generation. It’s when “the fibers of your coat brushed against mine for a single moment and then we were gone. I don’t know who you are.” It’s when the world is coming to an end and you still plant an apple tree.
And tomorrow we’ll do this all over, do whatever we can to make it through another day.
I think of Backman’s other books—A man called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry. Ove tries several times to commit suicide after his wife dies, but someone always interrupts .
And the apology of the grandmother.
MEANINGFUL QUOTES FROM ANXIOUS POEPLE
p.1 “only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.”
p.2 “Sometimes it hurts, it really hurts, for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn’t feel like it’s ours.”
p.11 “the difference between us and that man on the bridge is smaller than we might wish.”
p.21 “People are defined by their mistakes.”
p.26 “she said you can’t protect your kids from life, because life gets us all in the end.”
p.30 “We want to walk in their(our children) footsteps while they pursue our dreams.”
p. 31 “Drugs are a sort of dusk that grant us the illusion that we’re the ones who decide when the light goes out, but that power never belong to us. The darkness takes us whenever it likes.”
p.48 “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.”
p.57 “anyone can nurture myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass seems greener on the other side of the fence that's probably because it's full of shit."
p.71 “They are not the captives here. I’m.”
p.81 “democracy as a system is doomed, because idiots will believe anything as long as the story’s good enough.”
p.85 “For something to cling on to. something to fight for. Something to look forward to.” (Picture of woman on bridge looking out.)
p.97 “Very few people could live knowing they were bad.”
p.101 “you should always be nice to other people, even idiots, because you never know how heavy their burden is.”
p.101 “it isn’t always possible to be kind to idiots, because they’re idiots. That’s become a lifelong project for Nadia to grapple with, as it is for all of us.”
p. 157 “Sorry”
p. 163 “That I always think the glass is half full when there’s just enough to drown yourself in…”
p.177 “I don’t know why ordinary anxieties aren’t enough. Does anyone really need something new to worry about?”
p.192 “We were more just an unfortunate consequence of some bad decisions.”
p.201 “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”
p.206 “I believe the one that says that if you do it for long enough, it can become impossible to tell the difference between flying and falling.”
p. 259 “You children aren’t your children, they’re the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.” Conatus
p. 261 “humor is the soul’s last line of defense.”
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