Fredrik Backman's Anxious People

"That's simultaneously the sweetest and the most ridiculous thing I've heard in a very long time, Anna-Lena."

Fredrik Backman’s debut novel, A Man Called Ove, is a bittersweet depiction of a lonely old man as he tries to come to terms with a world that's changing around him. The emotional moments worked great, but the humor–while generally effective–seemed forced at times. 

Anxious People, Backman’s ninth novel, is, as the title clues us in, about anxious people. Or as a third person narrator often addresses them, idiots. “This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots.” A parent is anxious not to repeat their own parent’s mistakes, while spiraling down a path of no return. Another parent, having lost their spouse to death and daughter to drugs, is anxious about their son’s success. The son, in turn, is anxious about helping people. A person he helps grows up with the typical anxieties of Gen Z : global warming, animal preservation, the widening gap between the rich and the poor. A pregnant woman worries about the impracticality of her partner. An older woman stresses about her husband’s sense of self worth. These and other anxieties intertwine and culminate in a botched bank robbery and the unlikeliest of hostage situations.

Revealing anything more at all about Anxious People would be a disservice to the author, who couches every significant piece of information in a mystery and reveals them slowly. Sometimes infuriatingly so. As in A Man Called Ove, Fredrik Backman’s writing (ably aided by the translator Neil Smith) switches between being humorous and tugging your emotions. However, the problems I personally had in A Man Called Ove are present in Anxious People as well, and if anything, they are amplified. Both novels occasionally compromise consistency for the sake of humor. The interrogation scenes in Anxious People stick out as an example. A significant amount of suspension of disbelief is required to stomach some of the interactions between cops and witnesses in Anxious People. One of Backman’s favorite targets for mockery is the lifestyle of young people obsessed with social media. “Hand on heart, which of us hasn't wanted to pull a gun after talking to a twenty-year-old?”, he remarks. The forced humor is one of my biggest gripes with Anxious People. 

A smaller problem is that the writing is manipulative, but we realize that we are manipulated by an excellent craftsman. Art is manipulation, after all, and the level of subtlety one desires is subjective. Backman regularly uses misdirection and pulls the rug under our feet, and thereby controls the emotional flow. However, unlike in A Man Called Ove, the characters are not as well sketched out. We learn that a police officer is competent through another character who tells him. We learn that a man is not as bad as he seems when his wife explains why. We learn that a seemingly antisocial woman is concerned about everyday people, when she tells us so. A character called Roger resembles Ove. We initially see him as an older person with rigid views, until we learn that there is more to the man. But the subconscious association with Backman’s earlier work has more of a role to play in us sympathizing with Roger than anything he does in Anxious People.

Despite the faults, Anxious People resonates in parts. It deals with topics such as parenting, suicide, mental health, the destructive impact of modern financial systems on individuals, marriage, love and divorce. And loneliness. “I buy distance from other people… The most expensive things you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance”, remarks a character. Drug abuse is another topic Backman manages to deal with effectively. The narrator, who seems to be telling us often what the story is about, eventually offers what is probably the most accurate description of Anxious People : “Perhaps this is a story about a bridge”. Multiple inciting events in the story happen around a physical bridge. Anxious People is also about bridging the gap between people and overcoming our biases to look past people who we perceive as idiots. “Sometimes two strangers need only one thing in common to find each other sympathetic.” 

Despite some of its flaws, Anxious People is an engaging read. As a character remarks in my opening quote, Anxious People oscillates between sweetness and ridiculousness. Fredrik Backman is a master of crafting bittersweet moments and depending on where you are in life, you might enjoy it. After all, “... people need fairy tales as well, not just narrative". 

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

You'll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you'll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we'll have a lot more of them. And they'll be fought by babies like the babies upstairs.

"If I hadn't spent so much time studying Earthlings," said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn't have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will."

Before I started reading Slaughterhouse-Five, I assumed that Kurt Vonnegut was primarily a fantasy writer. My misconception was probably from conflating Vonnegut with Brandon Sanderson, the extremely popular fantasy writer who is all the rage today, given that both these authors have resources on writing available for free online. But while I have continued to hear high praise for Vonnegut, Sanderson’s work seems to be more polarizing. Naturally, I attempted to read Vonnegut first. 

Slaughterhouse-Five could be categorized as a fantasy novel. It incorporates concepts such as alien abduction and time-travel without attempting to dive into “scienc-y” explanations. However, it is mainly a brutally honest and darkly humorous anti-war novel that also doubles down as a cultural critic. The fact that Vonnegut achieves all this in 200-odd pages that read crisply is a testament to his abilities as a writer. 

Classified as a postmodern novel, Slaughterhouse-Five's first lines are “All these happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.” The novel begins with a first person narrator who resembles the author so much that we are not sure what’s real and what’s not. Kurt Vonnegut was a Second World War veteran who was a prisoner of war in Dresden when the allied forces bombed the city, razing it to the ground and killing about 25000 people. The narrator describes his meandering attempt to write a book. After all, “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre”. He ultimately pens something down, thereby shifting the perspective to the third person and tracking his protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. Billy is successful in his personal life, but a misfit in war. At some point during the war, Billy is captured by “Tralfamadorians”, an alien race that see time as a fourth dimension, meaning that they can see the past, present and the future simultaneously. Billy acquires this ability as well. He is “unstuck in time”. This accounts for the criss-crossing non-linear narrative. 

All American army men are portrayed unsympathetically--most of them are either bumbling fools or psychopaths. Even today, such an unsentimental portrayal of a country’s armed forces would attract controversy. In fact, Wilson County in Tennessee banned 400 books just two months back, including Slaughterhouse-Five. In 1972, a circuit judge in Michigan called the book “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar, and anti-Christian.” The author's biggest achievement is his compelling first-hand account of this dreary side of war. But he also has things to say about the traditional American lifestyle. As a character in this book remarks, “Americans are urged to hate themselves.. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor.” 

Slaughterhouse-Five has a litany of characters, but none of the characters undergo a transformational arc. As the narrator remarks, “There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because just of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.” Even so, we meet a lot of characters, many of them recurring from Vonnegut’s other novels. The narrator breaks the third-person narrative at times as well, with lines such as “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.” This reminded me of the Indian epic Mahabharata, which has the author Vyasa making appearances through the story - though Vonnegut is a cog in the machinery and not an all-knowing and powerful sage.

The underlying theme of Slaughterhouse-Five is fatalism and denial of causality. The phrase “So it goes” recurs multiple times through the novel (apparently 106 times), signifying a resigned acceptance of the vicissitudes of fate. A dialogue between Billy and a Tralfamadorian goes like this when Billy asks why he was the person singled out to be abducted by them:

"Have you seen bugs trapped in amber?" 

"Yes.” Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it. 

"Well, here we are, Mr.Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this minute. There is no why.”

I look forward to reading more by Kurt Vonnegut. Despite being based on the second World War, which seems to be an eternity away now, Vonnegut’s deglamorization of war and his social critique remain relevant. And his humor and wit make it all the more palatable.

Margaret Atwood's Burning Questions

A decade ago, I used to read more in terms of quantity and variety. I read far less now because of life and social media. Having recognized this, and hoping to correct for variety (while giving up on quantity), I decided to read some magazines. Short pieces on varied topics might help expand the breadth of what I read. On the way to the magazine section in the local public library, I stopped for a brief look in the non-fiction section, and I spotted Margaret Atwood’s Burning Questions - Essays and Occasional Pieces - 2004 to 2021. I have been aware of Atwood for a long time. The Handmaid’s Tale is, of course, extremely popular. But I have also encountered her name in other places, mostly through her reviews of other books that I have enjoyed. I had started reading The Handmaid’s Tale at some point of time, but I hadn’t completed it. But Atwood has been on my to-read list, and this was, I thought, as good an introduction into Atwood’s body of work as any.

That was a questionable assumption. For when you are already out of form on reading, attempting to get through nearly 450 pages of nonfiction is hard. More so if the book is a collection of smaller essays, requiring you to switch context multiple times. I am glad to report that I managed to get through this, and as I am wont to feel after finishing most books, I am happy that I did. The fact that through the nearly 15 years that these essays span, Atwood seems to have held consistent views with thematic commonalities helped a lot. 

Margaret Atwood, as she often emphasizes, is old. In her lifetime, Atwood has seen the Western World undergo drastic changes and dramatic shifts. She was born in 1939, just as the second World War had begun. Atwood suggests that the post-world war era saw Western governments actively nudging women who had filled in career roles during the war back to their homes to make way for men returning from the war. This was followed by the second wave of feminism in the 60s, the hippie movement in the 70s, Cold War, the Reagan era, the Fukuyama’s false theory of the ‘end of history”, the rise of internet and social media, and the post-9/11 era. And after the historical American aberration that was the Obama presidency, we had the Trump era encompassing COVID, followed by what seemed like the end of the Trump era. Alas. 

Even within the field of literature, it is astonishing to hear Atwood describe living along with some literary greats, and meeting some of them.

Why was Simone de Beauvoir so frightening to me? Easy for you to ask: you have the benefit of distance–dead people are less innately scary than living ones, especially if they have been cut down to size by biographers, ever alert to flaws–whereas for me, Beauvoir was a giant contemporary

she says, in her introduction to the English translation of Simone de Beavoir’s Les Inseparables. 

Atwood is multifaceted. She is a poet, a novelist, a dramatist, a children’s writer, a graphic novelist, and most significantly, a literary critic. Throughout Burning Questions, her voracious conception of works from the Western literature stands out. A lot of essays in Burning Questions take the form of book introductions, book reviews, and author biographies. Of these, Richard Power’s Echo Maker is probably the only work that I have read, but I still found her analysis of books to be engaging. Some broader literary pieces include her thoughts on what makes a novel a novel, and her distinction between what she calls 'speculative fiction', 'science fiction' and 'fantasy'. Even broader is her contemplation on the significance of art and artists. Atwood’s father was an entomologist, and a significant part of her childhood was spent in the backwoods of Ottawa. This must have been a big influence on her lifelong interest in science and nature, and a lot of the pieces strongly reflect her sense of preservation of nature and scientific literacy. Atwood’s writing style is generally witty, and this helps us understand her as a person. 

Atwood refers to the impact of Rachel Carson whose Silent Spring (1962) drew attention to the harmful effects of pesticides much before it was in vogue. Apart from Simone de Beavoir, she also writes about the influence of authors like Alice Munro, Kafka, and Shakespeare. Her later essays focus on the rise of authoritarianism and in “Am I a Bad feminist”, she defends her position against mob justice and for transparency.

As I read Burning Questions, I was filled with a touch of regret at not (yet) having read Atwood’s novels, and not having explored authors such as Alice Munro and Ursula Le Guin. But inspiration works by highlighting what one is lacking in life and motivating one to attempt to strive for them. After all, there is still time. Burning Questions is an inspiring and enlightening read.