A MAN CALLED OVE: AND THE COLOR IN HIS LIFE.

Book Review on A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman — By Bhoomi Kaur Narula, DP1

This book is a prime example of what it means for a book to be titled after its main character—as the
reader of this book, you are seeing the world through Ove’s thoughts, through Ove’s eyes. Ove, who
is trivially misunderstood by the people around him, and who has trivially misunderstood the people
around him. Ove, who is 59 and already lost his wife, and hates the world for all the pain it caused
her before it took her away.

The book is a heavy one, and it took me three days to get through. It covers topics of grief,
attempted suicides, and sheer anger so rationally, I was startled. That isn’t to say it is inherently a
sad book, because through this sadness, there is great support that is around Ove— and throughout
the book, he grows more and more aware of it.

Something that is never addressed outright is the fact that Ove, a man who can supposedly do
anything—if only, a little grumpy about it—hates change. Despises it, actually. He hates the way the
world has become ‘lazy’. He hates how technology has evolved to a point where he cannot
understand it. He hates how people no longer respect the signs around his residential area, the ones
that prohibits vehicles beyond a certain point.

Most of all, he hates how his world has become after his wife died.

When I read this book, I did not prepare myself for the first time Ove tries to kill himself. The chapter
before it ends with the words “It’s enough now. Now Ove is going to die”. This attempt gets
interrupted, of course, by his neighbours. As does the next one. And the one after that, as well. This
was, I infer, the author’s way of proving to the audience that without Ove, his beloved main
character, the world could not turn. He was right, of course.

The book is translated from Swedish. Personally, in the past year, I have made it a point to read
more translated books— to understand the ways the other sides of the world speak. The words are
in English, but the actually story, the language, is in Swedish. (Part of me would like to allude at least
a part of the heart-warming aspect of the book to the fact that it is originally from a different
language, and thus is the heart of another person altogether, but I’m not too sure. Maybe it’s just
Backman’s writing).

The book ends just as frankly as it began, circling back to the same scene where it started, only this
time Ove doesn’t appear as a grumpy old man to the reader but rather a man who lost everything
that made life worthwhile and is slowly finding his way to loving life again. When Ove dies, years
later, he dies happy and content; the color in his life, that dimmed so tragically after his wife’s death,
had returned, if only a different shade. The book ends there, with three hundred people at his
funeral and you, the reader, feeling all the more fragile and warmer than you have in a while.