A Frying Pan Becomes a Kafkaesque Nightmare

Illustration by ChatGPT

Book Discussion

Title: The Answer is No

Author: Fredrik Backman

Translation: Elizabeth DeNoma

There 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 invisible Law and the untouchable Court in The Trial. The culprit must be found out – that’s the decision of the apartment association’s Board.

What follows is a delightful exercise in absurdity. Lucas is dragged into committees, investigations and increasingly bizarre social encounters. His attempts to avoid involvement only entangle him further. A seemingly insignificant domestic incident develops a life of its own, acquiring an importance that nobody can quite explain.

Kafka’s genius lay in making the familiar terrifying. In The Trial, Josef K is arrested without being told what crime he has committed. He is subsequently drawn into a labyrinthine judicial system whose procedures, authorities and purposes remain incomprehensible. The more he tries to understand his predicament, the more deeply he becomes trapped in it.

In The Castle, the protagonist K struggles to gain access to an elusive authority that remains perpetually beyond his reach. The machinery of administration seems to operate according to rules that nobody can adequately explain.

Backman employs a remarkably similar literary mechanism, although on a much smaller and funnier scale.

Lucas is not accused of a serious crime. But the social machinery set in motion to investigate the appearance of a frying pan where it should not be begins to resemble a miniature version of Kafka’s bureaucratic universe.

The frying pan attracts more scrap and eventually a pile of discarded items appears in the place. Lucas is appointed president of the Pile Committee. There are Facebook groups now in which Lucas is added member without his permission. He soon becomes an Angel in one of the groups and the sense of absurdity transcends even Kafka.

Lucas learns that “the truth about problems is that the problem itself is never actually the problem. It’s always the people involved who are the problem.” The people now protest. There are four groups of protestors. One group protests against the pile while another protests for a pile’s right to exist. A third group emerges to protest against protests and the fourth group protests against Lucas because he claims to be an angel.

And the authority is both helpless and a participant in the whole theatre of the absurd.

Yet there is a significant difference between Backman and Kafka.

Kafka’s protagonists rarely find a way out of the systems that imprison them. Their attempts to understand, resist or negotiate with authority generally lead to further confusion. The universe remains indifferent to their suffering. Backman is more generous towards humanity.

Lucas gradually discovers that the people he has been trying so hard to avoid are not merely obstacles to his happiness. They are complicated individuals with disappointments, vulnerabilities, eccentricities and needs of their own.

Lucas’s involvement in the apartment building’s affairs, however unwanted initially, opens up possibilities that his solitary existence had excluded. He begins to understand that human beings are not always the irritating interruptions he had imagined them to be.

Lucas is happy as happy at the end of the novel as he was in the beginning, but he has learnt certain lessons.

Kafka might have given us a man crushed by a frying pan’s bureaucratic consequences. Backman gives us a man who discovers that the world is ridiculous, people are exasperating, and life might still be worth sharing with them.

 

PS. The Answer is No is free to read on Amazon Kindle Unlimited. [Most of my books are similarly free there.]