Key themes
- Grief as rules — the person who enforces order because he has lost everything
- Community as something that insists on you when you would rather go
- The curmudgeon as a study in love
About this book
Ove is a 59-year-old curmudgeon who has lived his whole life according to strict principles and following his wife's death sees no reason to continue living. He is repeatedly interrupted in his attempts at suicide by the new neighbours who have moved in next door. Backman's novel is a study in how connection persists even when a person has decided to reject it.
Published in Swedish in 2012, A Man Called Ove became an international phenomenon, selling over three million copies. Backman said he based Ove partly on his own father, who enforces rules as a way of showing love.
Discussion questions
- Ove's rigidity is revealed to be grief — rules as a way of maintaining the world as Sonja kept it. How does Backman make this connection — and at what point did you understand Ove's cruelty as pain?
- The neighbourhood's chaotic Persian family break all Ove's rules and save his life. What is Backman saying about the relationship between order and vitality?
- The novel alternates between past and present — between Ove's younger self and the bitter old man he has become. How does Backman use this structural interweaving to generate sympathy?
- Ove's suicide attempts are interrupted repeatedly by the needs of others. How does Backman make this comic and moving simultaneously — and does the comedy risk trivialising depression?
- The novel has been adapted into Swedish and American films. What does the novel format allow that the films cannot replicate?
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