Genre: Contemporary
Book Type: Combination physical and audio
Author: Fredrik Backman
Narrator: Marin Ireland
Pages / Length: 352 pages / 9 hours and 53 minutes
Publisher: Atria Books (September 8, 2020) / Simon & Schuster Audio
Book Description: Looking at real estate isn’t usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can’t fix their own marriage. There’s a wealthy bank director who has been too busy to care about anyone else and a young couple who are about to have their first child but can’t seem to agree on anything, from where they want to live to how they met in the first place. Add to the mix an eighty-seven-year-old woman who has lived long enough not to be afraid of someone waving a gun in her face, a flustered but still-ready-to-make-a-deal real estate agent, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment’s only bathroom, and you’ve got the worst group of hostages in the world.
Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of them—the bank robber included—desperately crave some sort of rescue. As the authorities and the media surround the premises these reluctant allies will reveal surprising truths about themselves and set in motion a chain of events so unexpected that even they can hardly explain what happens next.
Rich with Fredrik Backman’s “pitch-perfect dialogue and an unparalleled understanding of human nature” ( Shelf Awareness), Anxious People is an ingeniously constructed story about the enduring power of friendship, forgiveness, and hope—the things that save us, even in the most anxious times.
Thoughts: Sometimes you read a book that is about so much more than the story itself that you're left with a beautiful work of art that leaves you moved. Framed around a bank robbery, this book is about so much more than a botched robbery. It is about desperation, mental health, divorce, love, the want to help others, friendship, forgiveness, family, heartache, death, depression, anxiety, connectedness, expectations and empathy.
At a time when there is so much anxiety and depression, this book could not come at a better time to be read and make you reflect on how you treat others, but also to not judge others as we don't know his/her story. There is little separation in those around us, and this book does a very good job of showing how we are all connected. I could quote so many lines from this book, and narrowing it down is extremely difficult, as as Backman has an uncanny ability to write in a profound way that makes you reflect on your own life and the choices you've made. These were the ones that stuck with me the most.
Favorite Quotes:
🌉 You would simply have done whatever it took to stop the man from jumping. You don’t even know him, but it’s an innate instinct, the idea that we can’t just let strangers kill themselves.
So you would have tried to talk to him, gain his trust, persuade him not to do it. Because you’ve probably been depressed yourself, you’ve had days when you’ve been in terrible pain in places that don’t show up on x-rays, when you can’t find the words to explain it even to the people who love you. Deep down, in memories that we might prefer to surpress even from ourselves, a lot of us know that the difference between us and the man on the bridge is smaller than we might wish… So you would have tried to save him. Because it’s possible to end your life by mistake, but you have to choose to jump. You have to climb on top of somewhere high and take a step forward. (Page 11)
🌁 “Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong, you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by the swing… Parents are defined by their mistakes.” (Page 21)
🌉 The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit. (Page 57)
🌁 The worst thing a divorce does to a person isn’t that it makes all the time you devoted to the relationship feel wasted, but that steals all the plans you had for the future. (Page 57)
🌉 (Estelle) “When we first fell in love, Knut and I reached an agreement about how we were allowed to argue, because Knut said that sooner or later the first flush of infatuation wears off and you end up arguing whether you like it or not. So we came to an agreement, like the Geneva Convention, where the rules of war were agreed. Knut and I promised that no matter how angry we got, we weren’t allowed to consciously say things just to hurt each other. We weren’t allowed to argue just for the sake of winning. Because, sooner or later, that will end up with one of us winning. And no marriage can survive that,” (page 241).
🌁 (Estelle) … “That’s the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people’s…” (page 262).
🌉 (Nadia talking to Zara)… “I’ve learned that it helps to talk about it. Unfortunately I think most people would still get more sympathy from their colleagues and bosses at work if they show up looking rough one morning and say ‘I’m hungover’ than if they say ‘I’m suffering from anxiety.’ But I think we pass people in the street every day who feel the same as you and I, many of them just don’t know what it is. Men and women going around for months having trouble breathing and seeing doctor after doctor because they think there’s something wrong with their lungs. All because it’s so damn difficult to admit that something else is… broken. That it’s an ache in our soul, invisible lead weights in our blood, and indescribable pressure in our chest. Our brains are lying to us, telling us we’re going to die. But there’s nothing wrong with our lungs, Zara. We’re not going to die, you and I,” (pages 319-320).
🌁 The truth. There isn’t any. All we’ve managed to find out about the boundaries of the universe is that it hasn’t got any, and all we know about God is that we don’t know anything. So the only thing a mom who was a priest demanded of her family was simple: that we do our best. You plant an apple tree today, even if we know the world is going to be destroyed tomorrow. You save those we can (page 332).
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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