A Frying Pan Becomes a Kafkaesque Nightmare
Illustration by ChatGPT Book Discussion Title: The Answer is No Author: Fredrik Backman Translation: Elizabeth DeNoma T here are few writers who can make an ordinary frying pan look as threatening as a loaded gun. In Swedish writer Fredrik Backman’s short story, a frying pan looms large like the castle in Kafka’s eponymous novel, though the protagonist Lucas isn’t a bit like Kafka’s K. The story begins with the appearance of a frying pan on the ground outside the recycling room of the apartment complex. The Board of Directors implicitly accuses Lucas of having left the pan there. Lucas is a solitary individual who has carefully organised his existence around three essential pleasures: video games, wine and pad thai noodles. He has defined happiness as everything he has “minus human beings.” Lucas’s offer to pick up the frying pan and remove it from where it is not supposed to be is not acceptable to the Board which behaves like a 21 st century counterpart of Kafka’s invisi...
