The Nature of Things

  This is only the second of Fredrik Backman's novels that I have read, but I'm getting the definite impression that he writes character-driven stories. Never more so than in this case. His Anxious People are eight random people who are brought together in a would-be hostage situation in a small town in Sweden after a hilariously botched bank robbery and the two police officers, father and son, who are sent to deal with the situation. Each of these flawed characters has his or her unique way of viewing the world and Backman's genius is that, even if we don't agree with those views, he makes us understand that character's perspective and how it was formed. He does it insidiously, bit by bit so that we scarcely even notice what is happening, but in the end, we are able to understand a world-view that may not be our own, but that is legitimate within its own context. That is not a small thing. One of his tools in accomplishing this remarkable feat is humor. Regardless ...

The man called Ove is fifty-nine years old and all he wants in life is to die. His sole purpose for living, the only thing he truly loved, left his world six months before when his wife of almost forty years, Sonja, died. Ove is a man for whom life is black or white. There is a right way and a wrong way of doing things. Ove adheres to the right way, the way his father taught him. His ambition is to be as little different from his father as is possible. Most of the rest of the world does things the wrong way and this makes Ove the irascible man that people see him to be. Sonja saw the world in bright hues. She was interested in the people around her and lived to make their lives better. She was a teacher who was assigned to teach ADHD children "before ADHD was invented." She took to her job with passion and belief in the children's ability to learn. She got them to read Shakespeare.  Sonja loved cats. Ove didn't. Ove and Sonja had lived in the same neighborhood, the sa...