A Man Called Ove: Fredrik Backman

U3a Reading Group 29jun23

Ove would clearly be put on some spectrum or other these days – autism? OCD? He finds machines much easier to deal with than people, diagrams more fulfilling than friendships, and routines more comfortable than the baffling complexities of relationships. Signs must be respected! He takes refuge in the past because he coped with how life was back then and feels everything modern is a vexatious complication. His skills are dismissed as no longer required in the modern world – but that turns out to be not quite the case…

It’s to the author’s credit that he doesn’t medicalise Ove but allows us to get to know him a little bit at a time as a person. He tempts us to dismiss Ove as a cantankerous, stuck in the past old grump, but then undercuts that with passages describing his courtship with his wife that are almost lyrical, and then poignantly undercuts again with his despair following her loss to cancer some months before the action of the novel begins - not to mention their shared despair following the death of their only child.

This despair leads Ove, in narratives of the darkest shades of humour, to attempt suicide in various ways. His wife was clearly the anchor of his soul. She negotiated all those tricky relationships for which he was so manifestly under-equipped. She understood him – he was like her father in many ways – and valued his skills. Without her he is completely lost, like a machine that is irreparably broken, and can’t see any reason to go on living. His despair isn’t so much emotional as rational – just what is the point without her?

However this is a novel of redemption. Ove is not however saved by a Redeemer figure but by the local community of which he has largely been oblivious. Through a series of encounters they intrude again and again into the desert of his inner life, often at precisely those times when he is trying to carry out yet another suicide attempt, so much so that the coincidences begin to seem too improbable, unless we make allowance for the farcical element. The outcome of one attempt, suicide by jumping in front of a train, turns into a rescue, because of which Ove becomes a local hero.

I am not sure if communities are really as totally engaged with each other as the one portrayed in this book, especially in Scandinavia where I fancy privacy and non-intrusion are highly valued. Perhaps that’s why the first person to really connect with Ove is an Iranian neighbour, Parvaneh, who has absolutely no qualms about knocking on his door when she wants anything, no matter how frosty his reception of her might be. 

Comparisons may be drawn between A Man Called Ove and Forrest Gump – both feature people who seem to be misfits but turn out to have a deeper wisdom and to be worthy of respect. It’s hardly a surprise that Tom Hanks was cast as the star of the film versions of both novels. There are also possible comparisons with Groundhog Day, not only with the black comedy of repeated suicide attempts but also with the education of the chief characters to be more aware of and open to their fellow human beings. However with Bill Murray's character in GHD it's selfishness, not loneliness and grumpiness, that he needs to unlearn.

Lessons I would like to draw from Ove are to understand that there may be terrible pain underlying the antisocial exteriors of our fellow human beings, and to remember what a killer loneliness is in contemporary society.