Scandinavian fiction | Seattle Book Mama

Who can resist a story by Fredrik Backman? His soothing tone and positive message about the nature of humanity is balm for the soul. So although I seldom read stand alone short stories, I leapt on this one right away. My thanks go to NetGalley and Amazon for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

This is one of those stories where you can see what’s about to happen, in broad strokes, right out of the gate. The blurb gives us the contours, telling us that our protagonist, Lucas, is about to have his life ruined by a frying pan; his life is perfect, single with no entanglements. He has no friends that he owes favors; no girlfriend; his life is simple and uncomplicated. He has a nice little apartment that’s his alone; after work, he can eat his Thai food and play his videogames without harassment. He doesn’t bother anybody, and nobody bothers him.

Then there’s a knock at the door, an insistent one; it’s a small klatch of people that introduce themselves as “the board.” Someone has disposed of a frying pan in an unauthorized spot, and they are determined to root out the culprit and penalize them. Everyone is considered guilty until proven innocent! Lucas protests his innocence and makes a few hapless suggestions in hopes of mollifying them, but instead, they draft him to head a committee, and they won’t let him out of it.

This is a pleasant enough story, consistent with Backman’s usual style, but at the same time, because it is a short story, it lacks some of the most agreeable aspects of a Backman novel. In his full length books, Backman creates and develops a massive collection of characters, and he always juggles them brilliantly, developing several and keeping each of them so distinct that the reader can’t forget who is who. Here he is forced, due to the limited length of the thing, to keep it down to a small handful of characters, and while some will likely appreciate this, I miss the complex stories with infinite character back stories and interrelationships. So, as short stories go, this perfectly fine, but for those of us that are fond of Backman’s epic tales, it feels just a trifle anticlimactic.

Recommended to those that read everything Backman writes, and to those that prefer a more streamlined story.

Translated by Alice Menzies

Thanks go to Net Galley and Doubleday for the review copy. I am sorry to be so late here; the truth is that I kept setting it aside because I didn’t like it, and then returning to it, thinking that I was missing something. I’ve given up on finding the magic, though there are some nice moments here; I also have a strong hunch that there may be a cultural barrier in play. Those that spend time in Europe, possibly with some Scandinavian background, may enjoy this in a way that I didn’t.

The setting is a fine restaurant in Norway, and the protagonist is of course the waiter. The author pokes fun at the pretensions of everyone present. I like satire and dislike pretension, and so I expected to like this book. There are some clever character sketches, and that’s where I am able to engage, but a character sketch is by definition a brief thing, and so I am quickly disengaged again. I feel like the same joke is being made a different way a great many times, and the “neurotic waiter whose wit is sharp as a filleting knife” (to quote the teaser, more or less) seems not just sharp or witty, but downright vicious. And here it isn’t just a lack of connection that gets in my way; I recoil at some of the passages.

The book is supposed to appeal to everyone that likes food and wine, spends time in restaurants, or has European sensibilities. Food and restaurants are a match; but I don’t keep wine in the house and have no European sensibilities at all, apart from a few Irish habits passed down over generations. So maybe foodies that spend time in Europe will respond better than I have. In order to see print in other languages than the original, the novel must have met with acclaim locally, and this is why it confuses me that my own response is so negative. But a reviewer can only write her own viewpoint, and mine is that this book isn’t funny, and I don’t recommend it.