A Man Called Ove

“Ove had never been asked how he lived before he met her. But if anyone had asked him, he would have answered that he didn’t.”

4.5/5 ⭐

Turns out I have a new favorite niche genre: older men rediscovering joy (The Shipping News, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty).

Ove is a man who “went through life with his hands firmly shoved into his pockets.” He believed in principles and doing things the right way, not the easy way. An unobservant passerby may peg him as grumpy or outright mean, and in some cases they would be right, but he was also unwaveringly loyal and deceptively kind.

Fredrik Backman is spectacular. After three of his books, I am no less impressed with the way he sneakily draws his readers into caring deeply about his characters. This book, more so than Bear Town, relies on humor to get the reader’s guard down, before surprising them with incredible depth of emotion—joy, sadness, anger, love.

This is the kind of book that, after you’ve read the last page, you can’t help but sit quietly for a few minutes, taking in all that you’ve felt. Ove is a character that will stay with me for a long time.

I could understand complaints that this book is predictable—just looking at the cover and reading the first few pages, you could figure out where it's headed—but Backman writes so genuinely and with such skill, that I was completely willing to go along for the ride. I read somewhere recently that it is better to be authentic than original, and I think that applies here.

I highly recommend to anyone who hasn’t already, read this book.

Underline-worthy quotes:

“For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone.”

“We always think there's enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like 'if'.”

“Sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don’t share it there’s a good chance that it will drive them apart instead.”