A MAN CALLED OVE (2014/15)
By Fredrik Backman
Washington Square
Press, 368 pp.
* * * * *
Is there a more clichéd line in the history of reviewing
than: “I laughed, I cried?” I don’t care how hackneyed it sounds; my experience
of reading A Man Called Ove was
exactly that. It would be woefully inadequate to say I liked this book; I LOVED
this book.
Swedish blogger Fredrik Backman’s debut novel introduces us
to Ove, the greatest crank/eccentric since Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces. Ove is a
brooding man of few words, until it comes to the principles that are at the
core of his being. He’s out place in a world of computers, but he has opinions
about them. You certainly don’t want to get him started on what he thinks of
the kind of person who doesn’t know how to bleed a radiator, hang a proper
hook, fix a bicycle, back up a van, or—horror of horrors—would drive a Volvo
instead of a Saab. Things that have no purpose have no place in Ove’s world and
he’s had it up to his eyeteeth in the “stupidity” that assaults him daily. And
there is the special contempt he holds for the “white shirts,” their petty
regulations, their impracticality, their big schemes, their haughty demeanor,
and their amoral ways. If you have to ask Ove if he’s honest, you’re exactly
the sort of person with whom it’s a waste of time to converse.
We meet Ove as he’s on his daily and highly regimented
rounds around the neighborhood. He’s 59 and has recently been forcibly retired
by a group of white shirts who think they’ve acted in his best interest.
Harrumph! As if they’d know what a man like Ove needs! I found myself bursting
into laughter at Ove’s ever-growing list of what’s wrong with the world that he
assembles from his morning perambulations. If a bicycle chained to a sign sets
him off, imagine what happens when someone takes a vehicle into an unauthorized
area. In Backman’s lithe prose, we can easily conjure neck veins on the verge
of bursting. Ove ponders the question of who needs to be part of such an
idiotic world and concludes that he certainly doesn’t.
Backman chooses an unusual comedy of errors setup for his
novel. Each time Ove vows that today will be his last, some “annoyance” occurs
that interrupts his suicide plans. Among them: a man named Patrik (“the lanky
one”) who backs over the non-flowers in Ove’s non-flower bed; Patrik's pregnant
wife Parvaneh, an Iranian immigrant who already has two bothersome young
daughters; a heavyset neighbor named Jimmy; a teenager who wants to fix a bike;
an outlaw mailman named Adrian; a man who falls on the railway tracks; a nosy
reporter; a dementia-suffering neighbor named Rune who is both Ove’s best
friend and someone to whom he sometimes didn’t speak for years; and a mangy
half-frozen moggy Ove calls Cat Annoyance.
Ove’s rants are first-rate comedy, but I reserve my own outburst
for “idiots” (an Ove word) who’ve reviewed this book and said they didn’t like
it because Ove was “unlikable.” What stupidity! (Another Ove word.) About the
time you think Ove is like Ignatius J. Reilly; that is, a mildly demented
misanthrope, small parts of his life are slowly unspooled and these will tear
out your heart and stomp it into the Swedish snows. There’s a moment in the
book where Ove breaks character to punch a man who has blamed Ove for his own misdeeds.
It’s against his principles to fight, but Ove reasons, “A time like this comes
for all men, when they choose what sort of man they want to be.” That line is,
in many ways, the theme of the book and you should not assume that Ove is that man. What if he had become the
man he wanted to be, but that life was taken from him? How would you cope if
the things that gave your life “purpose” (yes—another Ove word), joy, and sense
were wrenched from you? We glibly use phrases such as “time to move on,” but do
we ask, “Why?” Or “How?”
This book is sometimes compared to another small gem, The Unlikely Voyage of Harold Fry, which
is apt in sentiment, though A Man Named
Ove is much funnier. Read it. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. Rob
Weir
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