A Man Called Ove book review

A  MAN  CALLED   OVE   a novel by Fredrik Backman; Washington Square Press, New York

Most of us know a man like Ove. He lives alone, down in the next block. Kind of peculiar, Stubborn. Opinionated. Usually angry about something or someone that can't get anything right.

We first meet Ove at age 59 in a computer shop. No, he doesn't want an i-pad, nor a laptop, he wants a COMPUTER! Within minutes he has walked out of the shop in disgust. Young salesmen nowadays talk such gibberish.

The new neighbors—a pregnant foreign woman shouting at her blond husband, who is amiably backing a U-Haul trailer in between the two houses after flattening Ove's mailbox.

“You can't drive a car in here!” Ove shouts at the woman.

She roars back, “I'm not the one driving it, am I?”

Thus begins a new relationship in the neighborhood. A new pair of idiots, Ove fumes.

Author Backman introduces Ove little by little, skipping back and forth in time at first to let the reader not only see him but understand him, and even like him. Ove is handy with tools, closemouthed with his thoughts, honest, steady in his job at the railroad, and considers the world to be governed by idiots. The one bright spot in his gray world is the girl he met on the train one day.

Ove and Sonja could not be a more opposite pair. He ,“a grumpy old man since elementary school” trusts only his tools, his car and mathematics. Sonja, a beautiful, lively girl studying to be a school teacher, could choose a husband from any of a dozen suitors. She loves books, loves to laugh, loves her widowed father. Why then choose Ove? As Sonja herself once explained it, no other boy had gone the wrong way on the train for hours every day just because he liked sitting next to her while she spoke. They spent nearly forty years of happiness together, he as a house builder, she teaching disabled teenagers to enjoy Shakespeare, until she dies of cancer.

Without Sonja, Ove has lost all the color she had brought into his life. He hasn't died, but he has stopped living. Surrounded by “idiot neighbors”, he sinks into loneliness, only taking action when some bigger idiot disturbs the orderliness of his neighborhood. Annoyingly, his neighbors seem attracted to him. The pregnant Iranian woman, Parvanah, and her bumbling husband and boisterous small daughters are always in his face. A stray cat won't let him alone. An officious welfare officer insists Ove's old friend two doors down is no longer competent to live at home.

Gradually the neighbors' aggressive kindnesses start to turn Ove's life around in spite of himself, creating perceptive and often hilarious results.