Review: A Man Called Ove

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This review is also found on my Goodreads profile here! :)

I had just spent the majority of my weekend reading the most delightful--and at the same time, heartbreaking--story of a lovable curmudgeon. I consider this book one of my best reads this year. It wasn't at the same level as reading Dark Matter, but Ove's story will stay with me for a lifetime.

I didn't find this book "hysterically funny" as Kirkus considered. I'm not sure if it's because I find it extremely difficult to relate to humorous writing, and so I don't usually gravitate towards funny [or humor-genre] books. Though I still did find myself smiling and chuckling at the funniest moments of the book. More than the humor, the book broke my heart in a hundred different ways. It was a love story between Ove and his wife. It shows how even a physically strong man crumbles in grief. It was a story of unlikely friendship between angry Ove and his jovial neighbors. It was a story of fierce loyalty to a man's principles.

Backman writes so directly and so cleverly. He manages to write unguarded emotions through the voice of a very guarded character. The consistency in which Ove was written all the while, highlighting his apparent character development awed me. The book was written with alternating chapters between flashbacks and Ove's present, which seamlessly blended together. One moment I was smiling at how Parvaneh easily gets under Ove's skin, the next moment, my tears are threatening to pour out from the way the same angry old man described the ray of light and color that is his wife.

Ove is grumpy, angry, and violent. But I couldn't help but love him. As Sonja so succinctly put it, Ove was the "strangest superhero" I've ever heard of. Despite being the "archetypal grumpy old sod," he has a big heart [hehe] and lived by sound principles. He didn't always win in life, but that never stopped him from being the good man that he is. He isn't the most romantic to Sonja, but devoted and besotted he was.

This is one of those pick-me-upper books that will still make you cry. As I flipped to the last page of Ove's story, I felt a tightening around my throat--as if I'm bidding and old friend, grumpy old Ove, goodbye.

--
(Consider them MAJOR SPOILERS) The lines that made my lips quiver, sent my heart aflutter, or made me gazed on wistfully:

"People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had."

"Men are what they are because of what they do. Not what they say."

"You only need one ray of light to chase all the shadows away."

"Ove had never been asked how he lived before he met her. But if anyone had asked him, he would have answered that he didn't...But if anyone had asked, he would have told them that he never lived before he met her. And not after either." <-- *sobs*

"You have to love me twice as much now, she said. And then Ove lied to her for the second--and last--time; he said that he would. Even though he knew it wasn't possible for him to love her any more than he already did."

"...And Ove fought for her. Because that was the only thing in this world he really knew."

"It was as if he didn't want other people to talk to him, he was afraid that their chattering voices would drown out the memory of her voice."

"We fear it [death], yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves. For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone."

"Something inside a man goes to pieces when he has to bury the only person who ever understood him. There is no time to heal that sort of wound."

"One finds a way of living for the sake of someone else's future. And it wasn't as if Ove also died when Sonja left him. He just stopped living."

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