Anxious People by Fredrick Backman reivew (non-spoiler)

 Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

This title and blurb are the two things that do this book wrong.

The name is one that you wouldn’t select off the shelf unless you were searching in the self-help section for a slightly obvious coffee table occupant.

The blurb is one that notes to a thriller, that you picked up after getting lost on your way to your gate at the airport. You were probably looking for a good fright, something that will shock you long enough to allow you to forget you hate reading and your week escape to Portugal or being stuck at the side of a pool, doesn’t change that.

The good thing is for both of you unlucky folk, the book is marvelous and you’ve made the most deserving mistake of your day by picking it up.

My complete love for this novel was not just for its being unlike any fiction I’ve read before, but by it having nailed the heartbeat humanity some believe to be impossible to breath into the characters that exist solely on a page. Every time this book was closed and tucked away in my bag, I felt as though I was shutting off a tap of history that was real and alive. And this humanity that held the book together was what made it so very beautiful.

This book will trap you with its whit first, Backman serves humour that is so hard to explain to anyone questioning why your snorting at a page, that you must force them to read it. Smart.

This continues for the first one hundred pages or so before you realise that you’re actually sobbing not snorting, and that was once keen enchantment with a certain characters personality and banter is now deep understanding for everything they are. You really fall in with this one, and you won’t know you have till your right there in that flat viewing with them, and someone knocks on the bathroom door, and you realise your toes are pruning.

This diverse group of characters, from an old lady whose husband’s taking a while to park the car to a man in a rabbit hat that doesn’t know how he ended up there, complete each other with their holes and gaps.

The writing style used by the author, tells the story in a backwards forwards motion that you very easily get swept away with, as it builds the blocks of our characters traits. Some stories are heartbreaking, in all their reality. Others are simply tales of things we have all experienced but questioned if anyone else had been there too. Those were somehow worse for your tear ducts than the former.

My favourite character in the book was Zara, who I hope if you choose to read this book, you will forgive for her ways and love her for them too. She is complicated in a way it does take three hundred and thirty-five pages to get your head around. Take that time for her, and you might love her just as much as I did.

This novel for me, tackled the silent resilience we all believe we have to live our life by, whilst using the extreme escapism scenarios we contain in our heads, to play out what will happen if we all suddenly admit we don’t know what we’re doing or where we’re going from here.

It’s raw and witty and wise and has that consistent string of interloping storylines that bring all our characters together in their loneliness, which I perceive as the reason the reader is able to slip themselves into this story like a warm bath.

To try and convince you to read this book I would just lock you in a room with the paperback, as there is no real exciting twist or dragon for our generation to latch onto. Us, with our micro-transactions of entertainment we tend to cling to for momentary joy. Its three hundred and thirty-five pages of a 24-hour period, that a man in Sweden managed to capture in a book and publish, while the days kept rolling past everyone else.

I suppose that is why you should read it,

so you don’t miss it.

(Hi chicks, I wrote this sappy piece for my paper at school and thought I would share, hope you enjoy!)