Book review: Utan personligt ansvar

Title: Utan personligt ansvar
Author: Lena Andersson
Genre: Romance
Year published: 2014
Pages: ~366
A place to buy it: If you are in Sweden you can click here to buy the book of Adlibris.
Other: Not translated to English (yet?)
Previous book review: The Years

Ester and Olof

This is the second book after Wilful Disregard - A Novel About Love and it begins five years after Ester's breakup with Hugo Rask - her great love in the first novel - when she meets the actor Olof Sten. He is already married and says that he will never leave his wife. Despite that statement so often being mentioned over and over again he starts going out with Ester. She is convinced that Olof will leave his wife soon and that his marriage is falling apart. And of course Ester is utterly obsessed with a man that don't really feel the same way about her. She even buy a car to be able to drive Olof to his work in different cities and so on.

Olof - the great victim of everything

If Ester is naive, then Olof is a victim - in his own eyes at least. He pretends that everything that happens in his and Ester's relationship is her forcing him. Of course he can't say no to her because he is just the poor victim of everything. All of the things he says and does is never caused by anything he did, he is just the victim of Ester's love, his wife's plans and at times even a victim of life.

To be honest, Lena Andersson really manages to create the kind of characters that I hate so incredible much. In the previous book it was Ester, but she grew up a bit in this book. Or maybe I just found a character - Olof - to hate more, so Ester seems fine now? Ester is a little less naive, especially towards the end when she realizes that Olof haven't been treating her like you should treat a loved one at all. I don't despise her as much.

But even if I don't like the characters I feel like I get to know them a lot better. At first I was afraid that this book and this new relationship would be too similar to the one in the previous book but they are not alike at all, this book is unique in that meaning.

Final thoughts

All of the characters have become much deeper and complex, I really love that. Since the characters are more complex the story follows. I feel like the things that the first book didn't have, this one has. But I don't find the language as stunning in this book, but it is overall a better book with deeper characters and a more interesting story. To get the full effect I would recommend to read the first book, to see how things changed and compare Olof and Hugo.