A Man Called Ove (2014) by Fredrik Backman

Ove, our narrator, is a grouchy old man, overly obsessed with following the rules. He's curmudgeonly and close-minded. However, he represents something all people should aspire to: He knows exactly who he is and what he wants.

He’s never understood young people who natter on about “finding themselves.” He used to hear that nonstop from all those thirty-year-olds at work. All they ever talked about was how they wanted more “leisure time,” as if that was the only point of working: to get to the point when one didn’t have to do it.

In this fashion he's somewhat of a mythical creature. Since a very early age Ove has consciously recognized his strengths: He's a handyman; good with machines and desiring of work that allows him to use his hands to fix a problem. So Ove needs very little to be happy; a job that allows him to diagnose problems, tinker, and arrive at solutions.

Ove is fallible in that he is a wholly concrete thinker. There is no room for the abstract in Ove's world. Everything he does makes sense on paper. The problem with this, of course, is that human beings often don't. So Ove finds himself struggling, particularly when dealing with people. I enjoyed this aspect of the book and, indeed, found its narrator to be compelling for this purpose. Backman continues to throw colorful characters at Ove, and it's enjoyable watching him respond. Ove could easily have fallen prey to cliché, but his touching moments when dealing with people who are worlds different from him made for some nice twists in Ove's story:

He’s silent. And then they both stand there, the fifty-nine-year-old and the teenager, a few yards apart, kicking at the snow. As if they were kicking a memory back and forth, a memory of a woman who insisted on seeing more potential in certain men than they saw in themselves. Neither of them knows what to do with their shared experience.

A Man Called Ove is cloying at times, and obviously shoots for for sentimentality, but the character of Ove's back is strong enough to bear the brunt of it, and Backman—earnest in what he's set out to do—is a skilled enough writer in his tuned-down, low-key way that it all somehow works without feeling like it's trying too hard:

“I feel so much loss, Ove. Loss, as if my heart was beating outside my body.” They stood in silence for a long time, with their arms around each other. And at long last she lifted her face towards his, and looked into his eyes with great seriousness. “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.

A Man Called Ove is ultimately a very light read, but it's earnest and it's happy, and we could all use a bit of that these days. It doesn't quite reach the happy-go-lucky heights of something like Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, but it strives for it, and it doesn't strive poorly, and sometimes that's enough. Highly recommendable to pretty much everyone, easy to read, and competently crafted.

⭐⭐⭐