The first book to bring me to tears in months (2024)

My poor husband had to listen to me sob and ramble on about this book after I finished it late one night a couple weeks ago. I can’t even remember hardly anything I said (maybe I should start writing those rants down so I have an easier time drafting reviews), but I do remember declaring that this is one of the best books I have ever read.

After finishing and loving Anxious People, I needed more Fredrik Backman. He writes with levity and tenderness in a way that’s helping me survive a really stressful period in life. My spouse and I are staying with my family while we wait on job offers and an apartment application approval. I’ve had interviews that have gone perfectly, responses to my thank-yous, and declarations of my amazing qualifications. And yet it’s been a month now of waiting for HR to approve an offer. And there’s nothing for me to do but wait.

The way the community in A Man Called Ove comes together to care for this aging man restored my hope in humanity. TL;DR, it’s like the Grinch for grown-ups. Ove is twice as dark as Anxious People and a little more than half as funny, but it has so much more heart. It deals directly, and continuously, with suicidal ideation, death, disability, and grief, but it also deals with found family and life after loss. People who don’t love the wackadoodle setup for Anxious People will find this novel much more approachable—the plot is straightforward and the characters are more down to earth. I can see the seeds of Backman’s archetypal character style here, but just the seeds. Anxious People has flowered.

Content & Form

Ove, pronounced “oo-vuh,” is the curmudgeon next door with way too much enthusiasm about HOA regulations. Ove does not like cats, foreign-made cars, bureaucrats, or the new neighbors who back their trailer into his mailbox. Ove does like black coffee, Saab, carpentry, his morning inspection of the neighborhood, knowing what makes a car go forward, and his wife Sonja.

The novel alternates at irregular intervals between the present, when Ove is 59, and the past, starting with Ove’s childhood and progressing toward present day. The flashback chapters inform our understanding of Ove as we follow his… idiosyncratic lifestyle. I really liked how the chapters were titled “A Man Called Ove [x]” and “A Man Who Was Ove [x].”1 It clearly demarcates what time we’re in, and it also not-so-subtly reinforces that Ove has changed; the past is the man who was Ove. But a significant life event (which I won’t spoil) has irrevocably changed him.

What’s in a name?

Backman’s archetypal character style reminds me of a parable, where characters are defined simply as “the rich man,” “the poor man,” “the thief,” “the good Samaritan,” etc. Similarly, Ove’s name tells you everything you need to know about him (though this feels kind of obvious given the title): the Swedish name “Ove” means “edge of a sword, full of terror.”2 From the start, there is no doubt that Ove is terrifying. We meet him as a man hardened by years of witnessing injustice to those he loves, and he has had enough. The rest of the novel is spent teaching Ove that there is still good in the world, and while there is also still injustice, he is not powerless against it.

Ove is more fleshed out than a bare-bones parable, but approaching it as such helpfully contextualizes the narrative style. To some dissatisfied readers this makes the novel feel like it’s “slathered with life-lesson goop,” or overly “happy happy joy joy.”3 But, like I talked about in my review of Anxious People, Backman’s style is neither purely Pollyanna nor straight-up depressing—there’s a helping of both.

Some people will still dislike it, but I think that sometimes seeing things in black and white helps us understand shades of gray. Not every novel needs to exist in the middle.

Reading experience: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Literary style/“value”: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

Overall rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.75

Trigger warnings: suicide, suicidal ideation, self-harm, loss & grief, disability/ableism, loss of a child/children