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A Man Called Ove: A Novel Paperback – May 5, 2015
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#1 New York Times bestseller—more than 3 million copies sold!
Meet Ove. He’s a curmudgeon—the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him “the bitter neighbor from hell.” But must Ove be bitter just because he doesn’t walk around with a smile plastered to his face all the time?
Behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness. So when one November morning a chatty young couple with two chatty young daughters move in next door and accidentally flatten Ove’s mailbox, it is the lead-in to a comical and heartwarming tale of unkempt cats, unexpected friendship, and the ancient art of backing up a U-Haul. All of which will change one cranky old man and a local residents’ association to their very foundations.
Fredrik Backman’s beloved first novel about the angry old man next door is a thoughtful exploration of the profound impact one life has on countless others. “If there was an award for ‘Most Charming Book of the Year,’ this first novel by a Swedish blogger-turned-overnight-sensation would win hands down” (Booklist, starred review).
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAtria Books
- Publication dateMay 5, 2015
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.92 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-109781476738024
- ISBN-13978-1476738024
- Lexile measure870L
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From the Publisher
A Man Called Ove: A Novel
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"In turns moving and funny. . . I wager that you’ll soon fall in love with Ove and be deeply moved by his situation, and after spending time with him, may perhaps gaze at the world around you with a little more empathy than when you turned the first page." -- Eric Larson
“Even the most serious reader of fiction needs light relief, and for that afternoon when all you want is charm, this is the perfect book." ― San Francisco Chronicle
"A magnificent homage to humanity and to the possibility of friendship and faith in long-lost love. It covers a lot of ground: marriage, love, race, class, division, gentrification. It's one of those good stories that connects." -- James McBride
“You will laugh, you will cry, as his heartbreaking story unfolds through the diverse cast of characters that enter his life, all uninvited. You will never look at the grumpy people who come into your life in quite the same way. A very memorable read."
― San Diego Union Tribune, Best Books of 2015
"An inspiring affirmation of love for life and acceptance of people for their essence and individual quirks...a perfect selection for book clubs...bittersweet, tender, often wickedly humorous and almost certain to elicit tears.” ― BookBrowse.com
"A light hearted, deeply moving novel about a grumpy but loveable curmudgeon who finds his solitary world turned on its head when a boisterous young family moves in next door. This quirky debut is a thoughtful and charming exploration of the impact one life has on countless others—and an absolute delight." ― CBS Local
"Readers seeking feel-good tales with a message will rave about the rantings of this solitary old man with a singular outlook. If there was an award for 'Most Charming Book of the Year,' this first novel by a Swedish blogger-turned-overnight-sensation would win hands down." ― Booklist, Starred Review
“A funny crowd-pleaser that serves up laughs to accompany a thoughtful reflection on loss and love… The author writes with winning charm.” ― Publishers Weekly, starred review
“This charming debut novel by Backman should find a ready audience with English-language readers… hysterically funny… wry descriptions, excellent pacing… In the contest of Most Winning Combination, it would be hard to beat grumpy Ove and his hidden,generous heart.” ― Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Ove is fifty-nine.
He drives a Saab. He’s the kind of man who points at people he doesn’t like the look of, as if they were burglars and his forefinger a policeman’s flashlight. He stands at the counter of a shop where owners of Japanese cars come to purchase white cables. Ove eyes the sales assistant for a long time before shaking a medium-sized white box at him.
“So this is one of those O-Pads, is it?” he demands.
The assistant, a young man with a single-digit body mass index, looks ill at ease. He visibly struggles to control his urge to snatch the box out of Ove’s hands.
“Yes, exactly. An iPad. Do you think you could stop shaking it like that…?”
Ove gives the box a skeptical glance, as if it’s a highly dubious sort of box, a box that rides a scooter and wears tracksuit pants and just called Ove “my friend” before offering to sell him a watch.
“I see. So it’s a computer, yes?”
The sales assistant nods. Then hesitates and quickly shakes his head.
“Yes… or, what I mean is, it’s an iPad. Some people call it a ‘tablet’ and others call it a ‘surfing device.’ There are different ways of looking at it.…”
Ove looks at the sales assistant as if he has just spoken backwards, before shaking the box again.
“But is it good, this thing?”
The assistant nods confusedly. “Yes. Or… How do you mean?”
Ove sighs and starts talking slowly, articulating his words as if the only problem here is his adversary’s impaired hearing.
“Is. It. Goooood? Is it a good computer?”
The assistant scratches his chin.
“I mean… yeah… it’s really good… but it depends what sort of computer you want.”
Ove glares at him.
“I want a computer! A normal bloody computer!”
Silence descends over the two men for a short while. The assistant clears his throat.
“Well… it isn’t really a normal computer. Maybe you’d rather have a…”
The assistant stops and seems to be looking for a word that falls within the bounds of comprehension of the man facing him. Then he clears his throat again and says:
“… a laptop?”
Ove shakes his head wildly and leans menacingly over the counter.
“No, I don’t want a ‘laptop.’ I want a computer.”
The assistant nods pedagogically.
“A laptop is a computer.”
Ove, insulted, glares at him and stabs his forefinger at the counter.
“You think I don’t know that!”
Another silence, as if two gunmen have suddenly realized they have forgotten to bring their pistols. Ove looks at the box for a long time, as though he’s waiting for it to make a confession.
“Where does the keyboard pull out?” he mutters eventually.
The sales assistant rubs his palms against the edge of the counter and shifts his weight nervously from foot to foot, as young men employed in retail outlets often do when they begin to understand that something is going to take considerably more time than they had initially hoped.
“Well, this one doesn’t actually have a keyboard.”
Ove does something with his eyebrows. “Ah, of course,” he splutters. “Because you have to buy it as an ‘extra,’ don’t you?”
“No, what I mean is that the computer doesn’t have a separate keyboard. You control everything from the screen.”
Ove shakes his head in disbelief, as if he’s just witnessed the sales assistant walking around the counter and licking the glass-fronted display cabinet.
“But I have to have a keyboard. You do understand that?”
The young man sighs deeply, as if patiently counting to ten.
“Okay. I understand. In that case I don’t think you should go for this computer. I think you should buy something like a MacBook instead.”
“A McBook?” Ove says, far from convinced. “Is that one of those blessed ‘eReaders’ everyone’s talking about?”
“No. A MacBook is a… it’s a… laptop, with a keyboard.”
“Okay!” Ove hisses. He looks around the shop for a moment. “So are they any good, then?”
The sales assistant looks down at the counter in a way that seems to reveal a fiercely yet barely controlled desire to begin clawing his own face. Then he suddenly brightens, flashing an energetic smile.
“You know what? Let me see if my colleague has finished with his customer, so he can come and give you a demonstration.”
Ove checks his watch and grudgingly agrees, reminding the assistant that some people have better things to do than stand around all day waiting. The assistant gives him a quick nod, then disappears and comes back after a few moments with a colleague. The colleague looks very happy, as people do when they have not been working for a sufficient stretch of time as sales assistants.
“Hi, how can I help you?”
Ove drills his police-flashlight finger into the counter.
“I want a computer!”
The colleague no longer looks quite as happy. He gives the first sales assistant an insinuating glance as if to say he’ll pay him back for this.
In the meantime the first sales assistant mutters, “I can’t take anymore, I’m going for lunch.”
“Lunch,” snorts Ove. “That’s the only thing people care about nowadays.”
“I’m sorry?” says the colleague and turns around.
“Lunch!” He sneers, then tosses the box onto the counter and swiftly walks out.
Product details
- ASIN : 1476738025
- Publisher : Atria Books; Reprint edition (May 5, 2015)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9781476738024
- ISBN-13 : 978-1476738024
- Lexile measure : 870L
- Item Weight : 9.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.92 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,257 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #28 in Friendship Fiction (Books)
- #33 in Humorous Fiction
- #320 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Henning Koch was born in Sweden but at an early age moved to England. After studying English Literature at London University, he spent a decade traveling and working in Asia, the United States, Spain and South America. He has a strong interest in literary translation and he has introduced a number of Swedish writers on the international stage. His love for Mediterranean and Hispanic culture has been a strong influence in his writing. His short story collection "Love Doesn't Work" and his novel "The Maggot People" are both published by US independent publisher Dzanc, and his novel "A Bit of Black" is available on Kindle.
Fredrik Backman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, Britt-Marie Was Here, Beartown, Us Against You, and two novellas, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer and The Deal of a Lifetime, as well as one work of nonfiction, Things My Son Needs to Know About the World. His books are published in more than forty countries. His next novel, Anxious People, will be published in September 2020. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden, with his wife and two children. Connect with him on Facebook and Twitter @BackmanLand or on Instagram @Backmansk.
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Ove is a man for whom life is black or white. There is a right way and a wrong way of doing things. Ove adheres to the right way, the way his father taught him. His ambition is to be as little different from his father as is possible. Most of the rest of the world does things the wrong way and this makes Ove the irascible man that people see him to be.
Sonja saw the world in bright hues. She was interested in the people around her and lived to make their lives better. She was a teacher who was assigned to teach ADHD children "before ADHD was invented." She took to her job with passion and belief in the children's ability to learn. She got them to read Shakespeare.
Sonja loved cats. Ove didn't.
Ove and Sonja had lived in the same neighborhood, the same house, since their marriage. Ove was known as the curmudgeonly neighbor who everyone saw as a bitter man. Sonja was the loving woman who everyone loved in return. And Ove loved her, too. He lived for her.
And then she died.
We get to know Ove in a series of vignettes from his life. Each chapter of the book is a separate vignette. They might almost be a series of short stories, but, taken together, they give us the full picture of a man called Ove. We learn that tragedies in his and Sonja's lives gave him every excuse for being bitter.
As we meet him, Ove has made the decision to end it all and join his beloved Sonja underground. He makes repeated attempts to fulfill his aim, but inconvenient life keeps interrupting him.
His most inconvenient interruption comes when a new family moves in next door; the "Lanky One," a Swedish man, and his very pregnant Iranian wife and their two young daughters. They accidentally flatten Ove's mailbox in the process of moving in and, from then on, their lives are inextricably intertwined as Ove grudgingly shows the Lanky One the right way to back up a trailer and the right way to do other things around the house. Even as he struggles to evade their clutches, the wife, Parvaneh, continues to seek him out and treat him as a friend and the children see him, and draw him, as a man of many bright colors.
This quirky novel, the debut of Fredrik Backman, was first published in Sweden in 2012, to very little notice, but it became a sleeper hit, and since then it has been translated into 38 languages (one of which, fortunately, was English) and it has become something of an international sensation. The New York Times called it one of the most popular literary exports since Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It could not be more different from than dark thriller.
This is a sunny and hopeful book. It was a wonderful choice for my Thanksgiving week reading. Is it great literature? Probably not, but I loved it! I often found myself laughing out loud and then a few minutes later my cheeks would be wet with tears. It combines hilarity and poignancy in a marvelous cocktail of emotional reading.
Of many favorite moments in the book, one that resonated deeply with me was Sonja's explanation of the evolution of a long relationship.
"Loving someone is like moving into a house," Sonja used to say. "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 perfection, but rather for its imperfections. 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."
Yes, exactly. How could I not love this book?
Within two pages into 'A Man Called Ove' and throughout the entire book, I was in stitches, laughing out loud heartily in a manner that had my whole body heaving, with laughing tears in my eyes. Within 35 pages, I was in love with Ove, charmed by him, despite his curmudgeon ways. Within 75 pages, with Ove's past further illuminated, the scope of Ove's life and his behavior comes through heart-breakingly in a way that made me at times forget that he is an ill-tempered, disputatious, and snappish man who never lets anything get by him.
Ove is 59 years old, lives in a row house in Sweden and drives a Saab. Due to two recent life-altering change to his life and his routine, Ove plans for a major decision. As Ove does his best to navigate the unfairness that is life and the unforgiving nature of getting older, his plans are stalled and inadvertently thwarted by an array of offbeat neighbors and oddball characters who Ove thinks are all "good-for-nothing idiots." Ove just wants to be left alone to go about with his decision. As luck or lack of it would have it, nothing goes according to Ove's plan, throwing Ove into an uproarious spin of irritability, threats of bodily harm and colorful choice words of disdain for his foes and prying neighbors. Just typing this makes me laugh out loud and smile as I relive the scenes in my head.
As previously mentioned, while reading 'A Man Called Ove', I kept thinking how much Ove reminded me of the miserly, cranky, parsimonious, but ultimately lovable Mr. Roper of 'Three's Company'. Like Stanley Roper, Ove is set in his ways and gets upset when anyone throws a wrench in his schemes or his plans. But also like Stanley Roper, through patience, kindness, and time exercised by those around him, you get to love Ove, warts and all. And oh how much I love and adore Ove.
The book is hysterically funny, lighthearted, and at times farcical. Yet, it equally has very serious and dark themes that will not only break your heart, but perhaps might make some readers uncomfortable. More important than anything though, is that the book brings up subject matter that affects many individuals. Illness at old age, the bureaucracy of medical care, the kindness and heart of foreigners, and the benefits gained when people choose not to judge by first impressions alone. All these are explored in an equally compelling, funny, but respectful way by the author.
There are many lessons, both hilarious and cogent ones, to be learned from 'A Man Called Ove'. One of the simplest but most profound is what it means to reach across and be kind - to strangers, to your neighbors, to those who have been cast aside, to misfits, to underdogs, and even to a smug cat that has shed most of its fur and hisses at you. Yes, be kind to all of them. You never really know what people are going through, and you never really know who people truly are until you give them a chance and see what goodness their hearts hold.
I highly recommend 'A Man Called Ove'. The reason I've rated it 4.25 stars is because several scenes, especially towards the later end of the book, were rushed and too convenient, for what seemed to be the sake of pacing or perhaps the sake of length. They were written in a too simplified, glossed-over manner. Whereas they would have benefited the book more if they had been fleshed out with more details. In the instance of this book in particular, it's fine, since I don't believe the author's intention was to write a literary masterpiece.
Regardless, I LOVED the entire book. I adored all the characters, especially Ove. Sonja, Parvaneh, Nasanin, and even the unnamed cat, were all wonderful too. Like the back of the book says "All you need is Ove." Indeed. All you need is Ove.
Reviewed in the United States on October 4, 2018
Within two pages into 'A Man Called Ove' and throughout the entire book, I was in stitches, laughing out loud heartily in a manner that had my whole body heaving, with laughing tears in my eyes. Within 35 pages, I was in love with Ove, charmed by him, despite his curmudgeon ways. Within 75 pages, with Ove's past further illuminated, the scope of Ove's life and his behavior comes through heart-breakingly in a way that made me at times forget that he is an ill-tempered, disputatious, and snappish man who never lets anything get by him.
Ove is 59 years old, lives in a row house in Sweden and drives a Saab. Due to two recent life-altering change to his life and his routine, Ove plans for a major decision. As Ove does his best to navigate the unfairness that is life and the unforgiving nature of getting older, his plans are stalled and inadvertently thwarted by an array of offbeat neighbors and oddball characters who Ove thinks are all "good-for-nothing idiots." Ove just wants to be left alone to go about with his decision. As luck or lack of it would have it, nothing goes according to Ove's plan, throwing Ove into an uproarious spin of irritability, threats of bodily harm and colorful choice words of disdain for his foes and prying neighbors. Just typing this makes me laugh out loud and smile as I relive the scenes in my head.
As previously mentioned, while reading 'A Man Called Ove', I kept thinking how much Ove reminded me of the miserly, cranky, parsimonious, but ultimately lovable Mr. Roper of 'Three's Company'. Like Stanley Roper, Ove is set in his ways and gets upset when anyone throws a wrench in his schemes or his plans. But also like Stanley Roper, through patience, kindness, and time exercised by those around him, you get to love Ove, warts and all. And oh how much I love and adore Ove.
The book is hysterically funny, lighthearted, and at times farcical. Yet, it equally has very serious and dark themes that will not only break your heart, but perhaps might make some readers uncomfortable. More important than anything though, is that the book brings up subject matter that affects many individuals. Illness at old age, the bureaucracy of medical care, the kindness and heart of foreigners, and the benefits gained when people choose not to judge by first impressions alone. All these are explored in an equally compelling, funny, but respectful way by the author.
There are many lessons, both hilarious and cogent ones, to be learned from 'A Man Called Ove'. One of the simplest but most profound is what it means to reach across and be kind - to strangers, to your neighbors, to those who have been cast aside, to misfits, to underdogs, and even to a smug cat that has shed most of its fur and hisses at you. Yes, be kind to all of them. You never really know what people are going through, and you never really know who people truly are until you give them a chance and see what goodness their hearts hold.
I highly recommend 'A Man Called Ove'. The reason I've rated it 4.25 stars is because several scenes, especially towards the later end of the book, were rushed and too convenient, for what seemed to be the sake of pacing or perhaps the sake of length. They were written in a too simplified, glossed-over manner. Whereas they would have benefited the book more if they had been fleshed out with more details. In the instance of this book in particular, it's fine, since I don't believe the author's intention was to write a literary masterpiece.
Regardless, I LOVED the entire book. I adored all the characters, especially Ove. Sonja, Parvaneh, Nasanin, and even the unnamed cat, were all wonderful too. Like the back of the book says "All you need is Ove." Indeed. All you need is Ove.
Top reviews from other countries
Aqui iremos conhecer o velho e rabugento Ove, sua vida toda, os acontecimentos, os motivos de alegria e os motivos de tristeza. O que fez com que hoje ele chegasse a ser quem é. Com toda certeza ou você vai se identificar 100% com sua rabugice ou vai simplesmente ter vontade de desistir porque Ove com toda certeza é um baita de um velho rabugento, mas eu te peço dê uma chance a esse senhor, conheça ele, tente entender quem ele é, porque ele é assim. E só depois tire sua conclusão.
Um livro que todo inicio de capitulo você começa rindo, porém após cada final de capitulo você leva um soco no estomago, depois que ver tudo o que ele passou e todo aprendizado que ele nos trás.
Com toda certeza um livro incrível, um daqueles que deveria se tornar um clássico e deveria com toda certeza ser lido por todos, ao menos uma vez na vida.
"He was a man of black and white. And she was colour. All the colour he had."
Sadly I can imagine the mess that Hollywood will have made of this story in order to earn more money!