February 2018: Britt-Marie Was Here
I found this little gem in the same used bookstore I found (ugh) Foul Play (ugh), but Britt-Marie Was Here by Frederik Backman is a delight.
From the description: “When Britt-Marie walks out on her cheating husband and has to fend for herself in the miserable backwater town of Borg—of which the kindest thing one can say is that it has a road going through it—she finds work as the caretaker of a soon-to-be demolished recreation center. The fastidious Britt-Marie soon finds herself being drawn into the daily doings of her fellow citizens, an odd assortment of miscreants, drunkards, layabouts...Funny and moving, sweet and inspiring, Britt-Marie Was Here celebrates the importance of community and connection in a world that can feel isolating.”
That last line quite perfectly sums up this beautiful little book. We don’t choose our communities, but without them we’re lost. How do we forge those connections? What if we’re not very good at it?
Britt-Marie was a character in a Backman book I read last year (My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry), and she was one of the most difficult. In that story, Elsa is apologizing to all of these people for her grandmother, growing to understand and appreciate each one of them and their struggles as the story goes on; it’s no coincidence that (spoiler alert) Britt-Marie is the last one to get an apology. She’s so...
Awful. Britt-Marie is kind of awful. She’s passive-aggressive and controlling, steam-rolling over everyone around her while obsessively cleaning and telling everyone it must be nice to not care about smudged windows. She’s married to a shit stain of a human being, and you just want to shake her for enabling what a narcissistic tool he is, but you also want to hug her tight because you want her to get away from him and be better. Because in spite of so much of what she does, Britt-Marie, at her deepest core, is someone who can be better.
This story explores what happens after she leaves Kent. There is a sense in this book that what we are seeing is not the end of Britt-Marie’s story; this is just the transition. And transition is so painful and heartbreaking.
In the end, Britt-Marie’s biggest fear is such a universal fear - we’re scared no one sees us. That we’re not making an impact, that no one will remember us when we’re gone. (At least, it’s a big fear of mine.)
This book had an ending that would have driven me nuts if any other author had written it, but Backman makes it work. I closed it smiling.
Why did I choose this book? Because it a) is a continuation of a book I loved and b) has a glorious cover. Would I read this again? While I enjoyed this book immensely, I don’t know that it has the reread potential of Grandmother. Who would I recommend this to? Fans of Frederik Backman, and, weirdly, Olive Kitteridge. This is a better book, but still. Favorite quote: “A human being, any human being at all, has so perishingly few chances to stay right there, to let go of time and fall into the moment. And to love someone without measure, explode with passion... A few times when we are children, maybe, for those of us who are allowed to be... But after that? How many breaths are we allowed to take beyond the confines of ourselves? How many pure emotions make us cheer out loud without a sense of shame? How many chances do we get to be blessed by amnesia? All passion is childish, it's banal and naive, it's nothing we learn, it's instinctive, and so it overwhelms us... Overturns us... It bears us away in a flood... All other emotions belong to the earth, but passion inhabits the universe. That is the reason why passion is worth something. Not for what it gives us, but for what it demands that we risk - our dignity, the puzzlement of others in their condescending shaking heads...”