Review: A Man Called Ove

I just finished reading a fiction novel ‘A Man Called Ove’. The author is a Swede named Frederik Backman. I wrote a review for the book on Goodreads. The same is reproduced below.

Never one to shed a tear, this book left me bawling.

A man called Ove is a journey. It’s a journey that, through outstanding character development and evocative writing that segues between flashbacks and the present time, unveils Ove’s traits - flaws and strengths - one by one. It’s a journey that begins with the reader getting cheap thrills at the expense of an old, anachronistic, unromantic, inflexible curmudgeon, and ends with the reader falling in love with his simplicity, honesty, loyalty, disarming candour, a twisted sense of affection, and most importantly, courage to fight for justice against all odds. Thus, the relationship between the reader and Ove is not one of a whirlwind romance, but that of a carefully crafted, inseparable bond where one comes to, as Ove’s wife Sonja puts it, “love…not so much for all the ways it is perfect in that for all the ways it is not”.

Not just for Ove’s, the book stands out for its development of each and every character, including that of the cat! It is also a poignant exploration of human relationships – father and son, husband and wife, neighbours, and friends. In each of these relationships, and to a certain extent even in the one with Sonja, he is foremost a dutiful comrade who is always willing to go the extra mile. Whenever he does, which is quite often, he goes into a heartwarming idiosyncratic self-denial about his actions having been motivated by even a hint of love. But indeed, love it is.

While the relationship between Ove and Sonja is a motif of the book, I also loved how things transpired between Ove and the two other important male characters in the book – Ove’s father and his Alzheimer-stricken friend Rune. Ove’s relationships with Sonja and his father complement each other well. If his father is the reason he starts living – “he decided to be as little unlike his father as possible” - Sonja is the reason he continues living - “people said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had”. On the other hand, Ove and Rune reminded me of teammates in a competitive sport who hate each other off the court but once there is a common foe on it, they turn into an unstoppable force. Post retirement, when there is no common enemy to fight, what little remains of the partnership is more bitter than sweet. But there is at least one moment late in their lives when, after a long overdue rendezvous, there is recognition that one was unfulfilled without the other – “And just as Anita turns around to go back into the house, Rune grins again, and lifts his hand in a brief wave. As if right there, just for a second, he knew exactly who he was and what he was doing there.”

There’s a tiny bit of Ove in all of us - in the tasks we undertake, the relationships we value, the things we possess – but alas, it remains just a tiny bit. In Ove, who is perfectly captured in the book as “a man caught in the wrong time”, we see those qualities embodied in flesh and blood, and I say this knowing full well that Ove is a fictional character. Such is the power of this book. Ultimately, the book makes the reader cry, if for nothing else, simply to compensate for Ove, who, despite all the monumental sufferings life throws at him, never does.  Through Ove’s life, the book personifies the age-old wisdom that life is not fair. But in that personification it also leaves us with someone who knows how to not let unfairness be an excuse for remissness.