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Review: In ‘A Man Called Ove,’ Don’t Let That Scowl Fool You

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By Glenn Kenny

• Sept. 29, 2016

Sweden’s official entry for a best foreign-language film at the Academy Awards proves that Swedish pictures can be just as sentimental and conventionally heartwarming as Hollywood ones. Granted, few Hollywood films would deign to tell the story of a protagonist’s life through a series of flashbacks brought on by unsuccessful suicide attempts. But still.

Adapted by the writer and director Hannes Holm from a best-selling novel by Fredrik Backman, “A Man Called Ove” begins with its title character (a convincingly gruff Rolf Lassgard) losing the railroad job that he’s worked at for more than 40 years. Lumbering, frowning and curmudgeonly, Ove trudges back to the small gated community that he watches over like a hawk and determines to join his recently deceased wife by hanging himself. He is interrupted by new neighbors, a young family whose matriarch, Parvenah (Bahar Pars), becomes both a conscience for and disciple of the old crank.

Slightly won over by Parvenah’s delicious Middle Eastern cooking, Ove softens into the mensch viewers will no doubt figure him for from the first frame. (Things really pick up when Ove reluctantly adopts a fluffy Persian cat with striking blue eyes.) Beneath the twists and turns of this ordinary man’s life story there’s a casual social history of Sweden in the last half of the 20th century. In a way, “A Man Called Ove” is also kind of a message picture, its finale insisting that the best route to cultural continuity is community, not ethnic exclusivity. Good-hearted stuff, to be sure, but mainly of interest to lovers of cinematic comfort food.

“A Man Called Ove” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned) for raw crankiness.

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A MAN CALLED OVE

by Fredrik Backman ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 15, 2014

In the contest of Most Winning Combination, it would be hard to beat grumpy Ove and his hidden, generous heart.

Originally published in Sweden, this charming debut novel by Backman should find a ready audience with English-language readers.

The book opens helpfully with the following characterizations about its protagonist: “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 torch.” What the book takes its time revealing is that this dyed-in-the-wool curmudgeon has a heart of solid gold. Readers will see the basic setup coming a mile away, but Backman does a crafty job revealing the full vein of precious metal beneath Ove’s ribs, glint by glint. Ove’s history trickles out in alternating chapters—a bleak set of circumstances that smacks an honorable, hardworking boy around time and again, proving that, even by early adulthood, he comes by his grumpy nature honestly. It’s a woman who turns his life around the first time: sweet and lively Sonja, who becomes his wife and balances his pessimism with optimism and warmth. By 59, he's in a place of despair yet again, and it’s a woman who turns him around a second time: spirited, knowing Parvaneh, who moves with her husband and children into the terraced house next door and forces Ove to engage with the world. The back story chapters have a simple, fablelike quality, while the current-day chapters are episodic and, at times, hysterically funny. In both instances, the narration can veer toward the preachy or overly pat, but wry descriptions, excellent pacing and the juxtaposition of Ove’s attitude with his deeds add plenty of punch to balance out any pathos.

Pub Date: July 15, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-4767-3801-7

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: June 28, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014

LITERARY FICTION

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More by Fredrik Backman

BOOK REVIEW

by Fredrik Backman translated by Neil Smith

by Fredrik Backman

by Fredrik Backman ; translated by Neil Smith

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BOOK TO SCREEN

by Han Kang translated by Deborah Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 17, 2017

A fiercely written, deeply upsetting, and beautifully human novel.

The brutal murder of a 15-year-old boy during the 1980 Gwangju Uprising becomes the connective tissue between the isolated characters of this emotionally harrowing novel.

In May 1980, student demonstrations ignited a popular uprising in the South Korean city of Gwangju. The police and military responded with ruthless violence, and Han ( The Vegetarian , 2015) begins her novel in the middle of a disorienting atmosphere of human-inflicted horror. While searching for a friend, a young boy named Dong-ho joins a team of volunteers who look after the bodies of demonstrators who were killed. He keeps a ledger with details on each corpse, pins a number to its chest, and keeps candles lit beside the ones with no family to grieve beside them. The details of this world seep off the page in a series of sickening but precisely composed images. Han’s evocation of savagery and grief is shockingly sensory and visceral but never approximate or unrestrained. Each character’s voice seems to ring in its own space, and though they are all connected by Dong-ho’s experiences in Gwangju, they exist in an uncanny isolation. The novel is divided into seven parts: six acts that each focus on a different character and an epilogue that pulls in the author herself. The parts shift in time from 1980 to 2013 and in point of view, making the reader intimate or complicit to different degrees with the voice of a dead person, a survivor of torture, a mother suffering from regret and memory. Han explores the sprawling trauma of political brutality with impressive nuance and the piercing emotional truth that comes with masterful fiction. In her epilogue she writes, “Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke.” Her novel is likely to provoke an echo of that moment in its readers.

Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-101-90672-9

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016

More by Han Kang

by Han Kang ; translated by Deborah Smith & Emily Yae Won

by Han Kang ; translated by Deborah Smith

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

More by Donna Tartt

by Donna Tartt

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