Warning: There may or may not be spoilers in the following article. Turn back now if you do not want the book to be spoiled. You have been warned.
They say that good books are supposed to twist your emotions and make you feel things for people who aren't even real. Well if those are the qualifications for a good book, we need to give Fredrik Backman's "A Man Called Ove" the legend status.
The book opens up with a brief description of our main character, Ove, followed shortly by him asking a store employee about O-Pads, as he put it. As the employee corrects him that it's an iPad, we see Ove burst into a fit of grumpiness that will later come to define him as a character.
After a short chapter one, we learn that Ove is a man about his routine. He plans out everything he does and likes clear and precise instructions. He tends to dislike change and people. That's when a new couple that moves in suddenly runs over Ove's mailbox with its moving trailer. It's a family of four with two small children. The father, Jimmy, is an IT consultant, something Ove hates, but Ove deals with that. The mother, Parvaneh is a Middle Eastern woman who reminds Ove a little bit of his wife. Their two children are barely school aged and add innocence to it all. Ove hates them all at first.
It is only thereafter that we learn of the backstory behind Ove's bitterness. He is a man that has been through hell. His father was hit by a train and killed, people burned down his house and sold him phone insurance, his wife was crippled and had a miscarriage then died unexpectedly, then Ove's work sends him off to retirement where he can't even work in peace. Literally, everything has been taken away from Ove in some form or another and gradually you begin to forgive his pessimistic perspective on things.
Ove then attempts suicide in hopes of joining his wife in Heaven, but life had other ideas. People interrupt his attempts to take his life or his attempts fail. Ove attempts to hang himself twice. The first time the neighbors come over with cookies and the second time the rope breaks. He tries to poison himself with his car's exhaust only to find out Jimmy needs a lift to the hospital. He tries to get himself run over by a train only to save another person from impending death instead. I mention all these things because then in a weird karma sort of way, all these people come back into the story and make Ove feel loved again. They make him feel the love that he so dearly missed after the people he loved the most in his life were taken from him. The book isn't spectacular because it's about some unrealistic hero who can fight off anything life throws at him. It is spectacular because Ove is someone you know or could be. The book is spectacular because its characters seem so real and vulnerable in a time where we don't know our own neighbors.
If there is one thing this book is fantastic at it is playing with the reader's emotions. The book will make readers laugh and it will certainly make readers cry. The chapters always open and with a beautiful symmetry that hits readers on an emotional level. That's an extremely difficult thing to do, and to keep doing and to keep having it work.
Overall I give this book a solid 9/10. I had to take points away because it did get predictable towards the end and the jerking of emotions was getting overblown. While it is powerful, at some point I had to draw a line of how many times I can get kicked in the emotional gonads. The ending while being predictable did deliver a great poetic ending that will leave the readers wearing. It truly is a spectacular book and one I hope you pick up soon.
