The Answer is No by Fredrik Backman
Translated
by Elizabeth Denoma
Chapter
1
“It’s a frying pan that ruins Lucas’s life. We’ll get to that.”
The first chapter ends with the above lines.
Lucas is a happy man mainly because he removed one thing that makes almost all other people unhappy: other people. He sails through life sitting in a comfortable chair, savouring the perfect pizza and sipping red wine, while watching a funny movie. Could life get any better? Lucas does only what he wants to do, a man with no strings attached. ‘He is the perfect combination of nothing”. He has never fallen in love or been in a relationship. The one thing he does love is pad thai with peanuts.
Fredrick Backman’s sense of humour shines through the
short story. He talks about the challenge of having neighbours.
“To avoid your neighbors, you have to make yourself
uninteresting, but not too uninteresting, because that makes you interesting.
You have to position yourself somewhere right between ‘What a great guy!’ and ‘He
seems … weird.’ That’s your sweet spot, because everyone wants a neighbor who
minds his own business, but if you mind your own business too much the neighbors
may be reminded that this is exactly what everyone always says about serial
killers: ‘Him? I remember him as a bit of a loner. Kept to himself.’”
Lucas’s troubles start when the board knocks at his door.
The board gives the impression of one body with three heads. They have come to
enquire if Lucas has a frying pan without which he will be considered a suspect
who has left his frying pan outside the recycling room, on the sidewalk.
The board calls that a violation of building rules. From
that point onwards, Lucas keeps getting drawn into conversation, and finally,
the board wants him to help in the investigation of the frying pan because they
consider him smart.
“Lucas curses himself. Being smart is the worst thing one
can be in modern society. All it ever means is more work.”
Two other characters meander
into Lucas’s life, despite his reluctance to get to know them. One is the woman
in the green shirt whose pad thai parcel (minus peanuts) gets exchanged for Lucas’s
parcel (with peanuts). The second woman in a purple dress is more brazen. She
has been using his Wi-Fi password without his knowledge, and has the cheek to
question him when he changes it. He finally gives it to her when she promises
to disappear from his life, a tempting offer that he cannot refuse.
Lucas gets to the point when
both women begin to have a conversation in front of his door, and he is drawn
into their lives, albeit unwillingly.
The frying pan that the
board mentioned slowly grows into a pile, followed by another frying pan, a
rug, a broken TV, electric candlesticks and something akin to a black fur hat, which
upsets the board considerably. They corner Lucas and vote him as the President
of the Pile Committee as he has good ideas. The pile turns into his
responsibility, much to his dismay.
The most powerful legal
authority in the country, a small man from City Hall, rings Lucas’s bell to
tell him that City Hall can do nothing about the pile because it is not a pile
of junk, but a hill, which is not his responsibility. He hands over a ticket to
Lucas for his fines because he finds two surveillance cameras which belong to
the President of the Pile Committee, in other words, Lucas.
Lucas’s life has turned
topsy-turvy by now with more people coming into it – the joyous Are There Angels
group (who consider Lucas an Angel), the weeping There Are Angels group, a real
estate agent who wants Lucas to buy his neighbor’s apartment, and of course,
the return of the board. Then there are four groups of protestors on the street,
two of them anti-pile and pro-pile. The third group is protesting against the protectors
and the fourth against Lucas. They are the Facebook group Angels Are Fake.
Lucas slowly turns more
human, as he ponders over the little issues that cloud the lives of the two
women whom he has grown closer to. The woman in the purple shirt is a cat lady
whose cat has just died, while the one in the green shirt needs to get back to
her family from whom she had wanted a break.
The story ends with a
solution that makes the pile disappear, a plan that Lucas dictates to the group
that believes he is an angel. He adds a different note to the Angels Are Fake
group. Between the two, a human miracle takes place and the pile disappears.
Lucas is happy even though “Happiness
can be exhausting. Honestly. It’s most often enough to just not be the
opposite. So, Lucas isn’t unhappy. That’s the secret.”
This short story is a
magical read with wonderful insights thrown in by the author. Satire at its
very best!
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