A Man Called Ove

 

A Man Called Ove – by Fredrik Backman

We’ve all known people like Ove throughout our lives.  People who are always complaining and are never happy about anything. In fact, these are people who only seem content when there is something to complain about; and if there isn’t anything to complain about, they can easily find something, tangible or not, to fill that gap.  Ove is such a man.  It doesn’t help matters that he’s an old man when our story starts.  We all know that grouchy crabby people tend to only get more grouchy and crabby as they get older.

So we initially read about Ove and his issues with the entire world.  He gets up every day and walks the neighborhood making mental notations of rules being broken by his neighbors.  He’s upset when his wife turns up the radiator ½ of a degree. He literally distrusts anyone around him.  In fact, he even punches out a clown in a hospital employed to entertain children.  Why? Because the clown convinces Ove to give him a coin, and the clown makes the coin “disappear” via a magic trick.  I should point out, though, that these incidents are told to us through the lens of a lot of humor.  Yes, we’re disgusted by Ove’s behavior, but the story is told in such a way that we laugh a lot more than we grind our teeth. 

Well, whenever we encounter such individuals in real life, there’s a part of us that wonders how and why such an individual can be so morose.  If we’re fair to our feelings, we often conclude that these individuals were probably raised in a bad environment that caused them to morph into an incredibly caustic specimen.  Maybe they’ve had a miserable life?  Or maybe their life was somewhat o.k. until some sort of misery or catastrophe interrupted their normal, stable world?

Author Fredrik Backman realizes this to be true.  So when telling us about Ove,  he also tells a parallel story in these pages.  In addition to reading about Ove in the present day, we also get a tour of Ove’s life and see him grow up, get his first car, his first job, and his first girlfriend who would later be his wife.  Sadly, these instances are often filled with turmoil and inequity.  When we read of these instances, we don’t dislike Ove anymore.  We pity him.  Instead of yelling at him, we want to hug him and apologize that the cards of life seemed to have always been somehow stacked against him.

I do confess that I found the “current” story a bit unbelievable at times.  It seems like, out of the blue, Ove gets to know all of his neighbors rather intimately after being thrown into events that cause him to meet these individuals.  Such interactions don’t bode well for Ove, so when he meets all of his neighbors, he isn’t exactly friendly.  In fact, he’s incredibly rude and hostile. Now, people that **I** know, when confronted with such an individual, would probably make a rude hand gesture to such individual, and then walk back into their locked house – praying that this unpleasant individual will somehow disappear.  Yet these neighbors do the opposite. Even though they don’t know this rude, callous man much at all, they somehow rally around him with affection when he clearly doesn’t want any of them around. They’re much more gracious around “Ove” type people than anyone that I’ve ever encountered.

Well, I guess this is somewhat necessary to move the plot forward, and it does allow the hard surface of Ove to brittle ever so slightly.  It’s still a great story overall, and I’ll admit that it brought me to tears on more than one occasion.  The subtle lesson here is to be forgiving.  When people hurt us directly or indirectly, there’s likely something in their life that has caused them to be the way they are.  This is something all of us should remember.   Being a person of forgiveness and turning one’s cheek often has tremendous value.

There was one subtle thing about this book that bothered me, however.  Ove is supposed to be an “old man”, yet we’re told he’s only 59.  This seems too farfetched.  In my mind, I envisioned this person being about a quarter of a century older.   Maybe 59 doesn’t sound old because I’m 54?  Maybe the author was a whole lot younger than 59 when he wrote the book and such an age seemed old to him at the time?  I don’t know for sure, but I would advise you to ignore the fact that Ove is only 59 and tell yourself he’s about 75.  This seems a much more believable age for this character and his fetid opinions of the world and life in general.