Their sourpuss faces leave an impression on us – the down curving smile, the strong features of the face, and the glare. A man who has loved, and who has endured things that would have broken most of us.įrom ridiculous moments of levity to heartbreaking twists that’ll remind you of a grown-up John Green novel (only with fewer witty teenagers and more senile old men and stray cats), A Man Called Ove is an incredibly well-realized vision of how wondrous and tragic an otherwise unassuming life can be.Our lives are abound with curmudgeon individuals who we cross paths with on a daily basis. And you start to see that beneath the man who throws a shoe at a cat is another man who has lived a wildly vivid and complex life. On one page, the old man mutters to himself that no one knows how to fix things anymore, whereas he could fix anything with a screwdriver and some tape on another page, the same man, only younger, falls deeply, hopelessly in love.
We get to know Ove in ways you wouldn’t first expect. It’s in these moments of Ove’s youth where we begin to understand who he really is. The book flips between the present, where Ove is an ill-tempered crank, and his past, when he was a quiet, reserved young man. But Ove, we soon see, is much more than his annoyance and confusion. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the humour in these old-man-yells-at-cloud situations is all this book has to offer. He slams the door to try to scare it, and when that fails, he throws his shoe at it and yells “This is private land!” At one point, Ove opens his front door to find that the stray cat (which we’re introduced to as the Cat Annoyance) has been sitting at his doorstep all night. Here’s another taste of just how grumpy Ove is. When the aforementioned lanky and feeble husband, Patrick, falls down a ladder while trying to do some home maintenance, Ove is there to help - but not without scolding him for being an infantile goon. This includes his new, overly cheerful neighbour, her lanky and feeble husband, the troublemaker teen and his bicycle, and the stray cat that keeps following him around.īut Ove isn’t without heart. Most things annoy and confuse Ove, actually. He wants to buy an iPad but he is confused and annoyed.
That I knew people like Ove and knew everything there was to know about them.
I started this book thinking that I knew where it was headed. Familiar enough right? I thought so, too. And most of all, he values peace and quiet. He likes to do things the old-fashioned way and hates rowdy teenagers. The titular Ove is a grumpy old man who lives alone. Sonder is defined in the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” If I were to sum up the experience of reading A Man Called Ove in one word, one feeling, that would be it.
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