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A Man Called Ove, in detail
A Man Called Ove opens in a Swedish suburb where a fifty-nine-year-old man named Ove has just been forced into early retirement. Ove is the kind of person who measures corners with a spirit level, enforces every rule in the homeowners' association handbook, and conducts daily inspection walks of the neighborhood with the expression of a disappointed general. His wife Sonja died six months ago, and with retirement removing the last reason to get up in the morning, Ove has decided to join her.
The novel is organized around a series of interrupted suicide attempts, each derailed by a neighbor who needs something only Ove can provide. A new family moves in next door: a pregnant Iranian-Swedish woman named Parvaneh, her hapless husband Patrick, and two daughters. They need help learning to back a trailer. Then someone's cat appears. Then an old man needs a ride. The interruptions are comic, the comedy is laced with tenderness, and by the third act you understand that what looked like a novel about a man trying to die is actually a novel about a man who has been loved more than he ever recognized.
Backman is a Swedish blogger and journalist who wrote A Man Called Ove in 2012, and the book's DNA shows: it has the episodic, cumulative structure of something built in installments, with each chapter widening the picture of who Ove is and why he became that person. The flashback chapters, interleaved throughout, give Ove a Sonja — and Sonja is the novel's emotional center, the woman who saw through Ove's armor before he himself understood it was there.
The novel is earnestly sentimental, and it earns that sentiment on its own terms. It does not try to be literary; it tries to be kind, and it mostly succeeds. Readers who want stylistic complexity or moral ambiguity will find it thin. Readers who want to cry on the train and feel better about the world will find it exactly what they were looking for. The 2015 Swedish film adaptation and the 2022 American remake with Tom Hanks both succeeded commercially, which tells you precisely what kind of book this is.
The big ideas
- 1.
Ove's rigidity is not a character flaw the novel asks you to forgive — it is the shape grief and love take in a person who learned early that the world breaks the things you care about.
- 2.
The interruptions-of-suicide structure is Backman's formal bet: that accumulated community is the only force strong enough to redirect a man who has decided he is finished.
- 3.
Sonja is present throughout the novel in flashback and memory, and the novel's emotional case is that a person who was loved that well is never truly alone.
