Anxious People By Frederik Backman
Anxiety is the equivalent of a plague for our generation. There is not even a single person unaffected by it as far as I know. Some hide it under the façade of extreme pleasantness and for some, it may be rudeness. We suffer in the self-made prisons thinking we are all alone in our suffering. We imagine that we are all broken and somehow that brokenness we treat as something unmendable. Many of our life-threatening problems will disappear if we open up a bit to others. But in a highly connected world, who has the time to sit down and listen without flipping through the mobile phone even once?
Frederik Backman makes it happen through a hostage drama with an inexperienced bank robber who was trying to rob a cashless bank. And people opened up about their troubles, despite their differences and prejudices. It seems the best way to open up to others is being stuck in an apartment without network signals.
It is not a book that I fell in love with immediately and thank God for that. I don't know whether I am getting old or philosophical, but these days first flush of infatuation is what makes me feel exhausted easily. But with this book, in the first few pages, I even questioned the moment I chose to buy it. But it grew on me slowly and steadily and towards the end, I was all tears.
As Backman himself says, all the characters are weird and stupid. The endearing factor is that even when we think that we have nothing in common with them, we cannot help but empathize. But we do happen to have a lot in common, even with the most unrelatable characters. That is the beauty of this book. However, we may try to imagine ourselves as little islands that have got nothing to do with others, our boundaries overlap and there is a tiny ray of hope I see in that.
"We're looking for something to cling on to, something to fight for, something to look forward to. We're doing all we can to teach our children how to swim. We have all of this in common, yet most of us remain strangers, we never know what we do to each other, how your life is affected by mine.
Perhaps we hurried past each other in a crowd today, and neither of us noticed, and the fibers of your coat brushed against mine for a single moment and then we were gone. I don't know who you are.
But when you get home this evening, when this day is over and the night takes us, allow yourself a deep breath. Because we made it through this day as well.
There will be another one along tomorrow"
This is a comfort book. When you are too tired of everything going on in this world, too tired of two years of living in a pandemic and want to have something to hold on to, this is the sort of book you must grab. I would not hide the fact that the ending is too good to be true even for a romantic like me. But today I will ignore that cynical side of me and have a conversation with these lovely people, who managed to make me laugh and cry at the same time. In the end, those who make us laugh with tears in our eyes are the ones that are worth fighting for, Isn't it?
Before you leave, here is something to take away from anxious people.
"We plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow.
We save those we can."
