A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

Source of book: Audiobook from the library

 

This was the second of two audiobooks we listened to on our recent road trip. Fortunately, it was better than the other one. 

 

I previously listened to another Fredrik Backman book, My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry, as an audiobook. This one has been on my list as well. 

 

Even more so than Elsa in the previous book, Ove (pronounced “OO-vah”) is a difficult character. It is hard to tell for sure if he is non-neurotypical or not - it’s plausible - but contributing factors are his traumatic childhood and young adulthood, his particular place in a reticent Swedish culture, and his other personality traits. 

 

Whatever the case, by the time we meet him, he is a curmudgeonly old man, reeling from the death of his wife (arguably the only person who ever understood and loved him), and faced with the loss of his longtime job. He sees nothing to live for, and is trying to commit suicide, but circumstances keep intervening. 

 

I mean, a man can’t even kill himself without being interrupted by needy neighbors, betrayed by faulty ropes, and expected to save people from being hit by trains. It’s a tough world. 

 

You can already tell that this book is filled with some really black humor. 

 

Poor Ove. He is an analogue man in an increasingly digital world. The old ways of doing things are fading away, and the younger generations just don’t get it. For someone who was highly competent at many things for most of his life, the loss of his job and all this new technology are more than he can take. 

 

But things are not as black as he thinks they are. His new next door neighbors aren’t bad, actually, as he eventually comes to find out. Patrick is a bit helpless when it comes to doing anything involving objects rather than numbers, sure, but his wife, Parvaneh (of Iranian descent) is sensible enough. Another neighbor, Jimmy, also turns out to be a good guy. 

 

But then there is also Rune, Ove’s longtime frenemy, who is descending into dementia, and has been threatened with placement in a nursing home by social services. It’s all very distressing. 

 

And why can’t people stop driving their cars into the residential area in violation of clearly posted rules???

 

The book is told in alternating sections - the present day, and flashbacks to the rest of Ove’s life. As a result, the history that makes Ove who he is is gradually revealed to the reader, and the story begins to form an arc, with the turning point coming as Ove decides to join forces with his neighbors to prevent Rune from being sent to a nursing home. 

 

The gradual thawing of Ove’s heart that takes place is fun to watch - facilitated by a pair of young girls and a cat. Don’t forget the cat. By the end, Ove has, in his crusty and cantankerous way, managed to talk a father into accepting his gay son, taught a young man how to repair bicycles and cars, taught Parvaneh how to drive a car - manual transmission and all - and gained a satisfying victory over an officious bureaucrat. 

 

A Man Called Ove is Backman’s first novel, and grew out of a blog he was writing. He read a news story about an old man who got into an altercation trying to buy tickets to a museum. He saw some of himself in the man, and started blogging about his own pet peeves with modern life using the character of Ove. Eventually, he decided to write a whole book about him. 

 

Ove is not the only character in the book drawn from Backman’s life. Parvaneh is likely modeled after Backman’s wife, and the children after his own. 

 

Having read both books, I think that A Man Called Ove shows a few signs of being a debut novel. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, but somehow My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry feels a bit more polished. It’s subtle, because Ove is a well written book, but I feel that Backman found his voice a bit more by his second book. Ove is good, though, and well worth reading. 

 

I think one of the things that this book really brings out is the way that men are socialized (and not just in the United States) to avoid dealing with unpleasant emotions. Ove has suffered a lot of trauma - the early death of his mother, his need to work from a young age, the sudden death of his father, his lovingly built house burning down, bullying by a nasty co-worker, and more. His pain and hurt has nowhere to go, so he expresses it primarily through anger, just like most men are expected to do. 

 

This isn’t healthy, of course, and it is one reason that men are struggling to cope with a changing world. 

 

The problem of worker displacement is also a real one - a huge challenge that will be facing us in the near future is what to do about AI and its ability to displace significant portions of the clerical/professional class - a current source of middle-class jobs. Simply putting workers out to pasture (or, as the Republican plan seems to be, just letting them starve) is not an ethically acceptable option, and it will not lead to positive social consequences. Ove’s loss of job leads to a loss of identity, and thence to increasingly antisocial and suicidal behavior. 

 

A central tragedy in the book is the disintegration of the friendship between Ove and Rune over the course of decades. The two were good friends, and could and should have remained so, but a series of disagreements, combined with their innate stubbornness and obsessive natures led to a breech that was never healed. The sadness for the reader - and indeed for Ove as he eventually realizes - is that he has lost his chance for reconciliation now that Rune no longer knows who he is. 

 

The book does bring some interesting hope, however. Even crusty old Ove is capable of adapting to social change, as his friendship with Parvaneh and positive interaction with the immigrant father of the gay boy (whose name eludes me at the moment) demonstrate. It is not inevitable that older people descend into fear and bigotry as the world changes - the opposite is also an option, and one we should work to cultivate. 

 

Backman is technically an older Millennial, but close enough to my age to feel like a peer. Throughout the two books of his I have read, he wrestles with the struggles of intergenerational relationships - whether the older Ove trying to find a place in a younger world, to the young Elsa, who is so often disregarded by her parents’ generation. 

 

The complexities of the characters are what makes the book transcend its plot. As in My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry, Granny’s assessment of humanity rings true: most people are a mixture of shitty and not-entirely shitty. That goes for Ove for sure. 

 

The audiobook for this was good, read by George Newbern. The translation (by Henning Koch) shares with the translations of Backman’s other books a generally “British” feel, with “bloody” used as a swear rather than the American equivalents. Still, the book retains its Swedish feel - I believe there is a national style that runs through literature that is visible even after translation. There is a certain absurdity, a certain reticence, and a kind of black deadpan humor that has a feel all its own. 

 

I should also mention that despite its heavy themes, this book is actually rather humorous. My kids laughed through a lot of it, in fact. The ludicrousness of Ove’s obsessions, and his impotent fury when the world doesn’t work how he thinks it should are indeed amusing, particularly since Backman is, deep down, sympathetic to Ove, and is poking gentle fun at him. (And himself, apparently.) 

 

A Man Called Ove is a bit unusual, but that’s a good thing. It’s worth reading. 

 

***

 

I am a big proponent of reading books in translation. The United States and other English-speaking countries are not the entire world, and reading outside of those perspectives can expand one’s ability to see the world as others see it. 

 

I work to read a number of books from other languages each year. You can find my list of books that I have discussed on this blog here.