A note: While this book is amusing and light-hearted, it does deal with topics such as grief and suicide.
This one is for Thomas. (See, I read a Swedish author other than Astrid Lindgren.)
Plot:
Fifty-nine-year-old Ove lives in a house in a cul-de-sac in Sweden. He is the quintessential grumpy old man, making rounds, telling neighbors where they can and cannot leave their bikes, where they can and cannot drive their cars, and enforcing other rules of earth-shattering importance. He yells “Scram!” at a stray cat that hangs around his front yard.
The reader learns that Ove’s employer has let him go. They waited until Monday because they didn’t want to spoil his weekend. “Won’t it be nice taking it a bit easy?” they ask him at the office.
“Life was never supposed to be like this,” he tells his wife, Sonja. He buys Sonja flowers (after haggling with the clerk about the price). The reader learns Sonja passed away about six months earlier, and he’s bringing the flowers to her grave.
Ove believes the measure of a man is his capability to do things. He no longer can; he’s not working. He has no family. He feels ready to join Sonja. He dons his best clothes and lays out perfect plans, complete with paperwork, to join her.
Sometimes, perfect plans just don’t work out.
A family moves in across the street from Ove: a very pregnant young woman, a tall, awkward young man, and their two children.
Amusing complications follow one after another. Ove sees these people—whose difficulties are not his concern—as problems he can solve, even if they’re too thick, uneducated, or untrained to solve them on their own.
“Didn’t your dad ever show you how to fix a flat tire?” he growls at one young man after he takes over the task from him.
“My old man’s in the slammer,” the young man says.
Ove teaches him how to do it.
Thoughts:
Reading this book is the first time in a long time that I’ve laughed out loud at a book. It sounds dour; Ove first appears to be the neighbor from hell. While I can relate to his impulse to shout at the kids to get off his goddamn lawn and his need for strict routine, he’s not the sort of person one wants to live across the street from.
His intention to kill himself is serious and sincere. Things keep getting in the way. At one juncture, after several failed attempts, an issue comes up where he speaks to his wife at her graveside, telling her he’ll join her soon—after he takes care of this important matter.
Ove is judgmental of his neighbors and has maintained a decades-long feud with a former friend. He can’t remember how it all got started.
Many of his pointed observations about the neighbors are fun to read. For example, regarding the girlfriend of a neighbor Ove barely knows: “Ten years younger. The Blond Weed, Ove calls her. Tottering around the streets like an inebriated panda on heels as long as box wrenches, with clown paint all over her face and sunglasses so big one can’t tell whether they’re glasses or some kind of helmet. She also has one of those handbag animals, running off the leash and pissing on the paving stones outside Ove’s house. She thinks Ove doesn’t notice, but Ove always notices.” pp. 11-12
His story unfolds in flashbacks. The reader gets to know Ove in his less-curmudgeonly days. He doesn’t hate the world so much as he’s been burned by the faceless bureaucracy, the “men in white shirts.”
The book is not realistic, but it is fun. Happily recommended. And you don’t have to drive a Saab, but it helps.
The was adapted into a 2022 film titled A Man Called Otto with Tom Hanks as Otto.
Title: A Man Called Ove
Author: Fredrik Backman (b. 1981)
First published: 2012 Swedish; 2013 English
Length: novel
