A Man Called Ove - Fredrik Backman

"I'm sitting here this afternoon, alone. Alone and contemplating. Contemplating life. Contemplating time. Contemplating age. Just contemplating...I do so with tear streaked cheeks. I've just finished crying. I've just parted with a man I've never met, yet a man I feel I know so well. A man I disliked in the beginning, yet a man I loved at the end. A man who spent his life contemplating. A Man Called Ove. " . - From Goodreads. But this is exactly my feeling  too.

"Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it's often one of the greatest motivations for living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury. Some need its constant presence to even be aware of its antithesis. Others become so preoccupied with it that they go into the waiting room long before it has announced its arrival. We fear it, 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."

Ove  is an inflexible man. He thinks himself surrounded by idiots, with people always disappointing him. Over the years he has been conned, ripped off and harrassed, mainly by bureaucrats ("the men in the white shirts"), whom he despises. He is a man who lives life fairly and squarely but finds himself beset by injustice and bad luck. Ove has certainly had his fair share of sadness. At 59, he's lost his job as well as the love of his life, his wife Sonja. He misses Sonja so much that sometimes he can't bear existing in his own body.

"Loving someone is like moving into a house. At first you fall in love with all the new things, amazed every morning that all this belongs to you, as if fearing that someone would suddenly come rushing in through the door to explain that a terrible mistake had been made, you weren't actually supposed to live in a wonderful place like this. Then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of all its perfections, but rather for its imperpections. You get to know all the nooks and crannies. How to avoid getting the key caught in the lock when it's cold outside. Which of the floorboards flex slightly when one steps on them or exactly how to open the wardrobe doors without them creaking. These are the little secrets that make it your home."

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

Life has got to the point where Ove's had enough. He is fed up. So fed up that he simply wants to end it all. He wants out of this world.

A Man Called Ove essentially calls out the dangers of living in a society that focuses more on thought than action, and highlights the risk of imprisoning oneself in grief.

There is a somberness to this novel, but there is also optimism and lots of laugh out loud humor.

“Ove glares out of the window. The poser is jogging. Not that Ove is provoked by jogging. Not at all. Ove couldn’t give a damn about people jogging. What he can’t understand is why they have to make such a big thing of it. With those smug smiles on their faces, as if they were out there curing pulmonary emphysema. Either they walk fast or they run slowly, that’s what joggers do. It’s a forty-year-old man’s way of telling the world that he can’t do anything right. Is it really necessary to dress up as a fourteen-year-old Romanian gymnast in order to be able to do it? Or the Olympic tobogganing team? Just because one shuffles aimlessly around the block for three quarters of an hour?”

Backman's writing is clean and simple, at times deceptively so, with its gentle, episodic and occasionally repetitive structure. The story is laced with loneliness, with life's numerous disappointments and the great grey weight of the real; the last chapters deliver some unexpectedly savage emotional blows. But this is tempered with a sense of quiet celebration.

A note of hope threads through the writing, building slowly, and the small details as much as the grand narrative delight and move: the moments of connection, the reawakening of a man frozen by grief, the ability of people to touch one another's lives.

Having lost his mother very early, and father by the time he was 16, he felt lonely, but carried their footprints. He was not the sort that told tales about what other people did. His one of the longest sentence said was, ' Men are what they are because of what they do. Not what they say'. Soon after he met Sonja who often said 'all roads lead to something you were always predestined to do'. For her it was something. For Over it was someone.