Book review: A Man Called Ove

"We can busy ourselves with living or with dying, Ove."

If you want a one sentence summary of A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman, there it is. Over the course of the book, he does just that - first he busies himself with dying (multiple suicide attempts, which must be aborted in order to help a neighbor), and then gradually, with living (becoming Granddad to the neighbor kids).

The blurbs my copy is saddled with, however, might lead you to expect something different. Certainly not suicide attempts and borderline OCD, wrapped in dark humor though they be. "Hysterically funny," says Kirkus Reviews. "A funny crowd-pleaser that serves up laughs to accompany a thoughtful reflection on loss and love," says Publishers Weekly. Me and the critics must have been reading different books, because I got the exact opposite. There are some laughs, sure - even the saddest times need not and indeed are not unremittingly grim and terrible - but really the book is a reflection on loss and love. The laughs are secondary.

Grief and the dealing therewith is the biggest theme. Backman writes, "[T]he greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone." That's at least Ove's greatest fear; or, if not fear, then the difficulty he must face throughout the book. How does one carry on when one's love is gone? How do you make sense of and navigate the world when the person who was your world is dead?

You do it by living, the book says. Living in the best (or only) way you know how. For Ove, living is in the doing and the fighting. Fighting for what's right, fighting for the rules (Ove is Lawful something alignment, that's for darn sure), fighting sometimes just for the sake of fighting so that you can feel alive. He reminds me of Granny Weatherwax, who Pratchett described thusly: "Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world's greatest creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge."

Ove, too, is angry. Angry at the men in white shirts for stymying him at every turn, angry at the Youths for not buying sensible cars, angry at God for letting his wife die, angry at people who drive on the grass when the sign clearly says not to. He's angry at being made to retire, at being made redundant in his old age. He's angry at the world for changing, and not appreciating his contributions. But that anger? That fight? It's what eventually connects him to a full life. Somebody has to help; somebody has to keep the white shirts from taking away his Alzheimer-stricken friend. And that someone is Ove, brimming with enough vigor and fight to shout down a whole gaggle of bureacrats and a whole truckful of skinheads.

xo, 

Devo