A Man Called Ove

Fredrik Backman’s debut novel, published in Swedish in 2012 and translated into English in 2015, became an international bestseller of a kind that literary fiction rarely produces-the kind that sells millions of copies across cultures, becomes a beloved film, and apparently makes its readers cry in public on trains and airplanes. Understanding this phenomenon requires understanding both what the novel does and the need it meets.

Ove is fifty-nine, recently retired, and widowed-a man formed by loss and stubbornness into something that looks like misanthropy but is, the novel slowly reveals, something more like grief in its most armored form. He is attempting, as the novel opens, to kill himself. The arrival of a boisterous new family next door-a pregnant Iranian-Swedish woman, her cheerfully incompetent husband, their children-keeps interrupting these attempts.

Backman writes in a simple, emotionally transparent style that owes more to folk storytelling than to literary fiction, and this simplicity is both the novel’s strength and its limitation. The emotional architecture is schematic-each revelation of Ove’s past corresponds to a present-day thaw-but Backman constructs it with such warmth and such precise comic timing that the schematism becomes irrelevant. When you find yourself in tears over a man and his dead cat in the third chapter, formal objections feel beside the point.

A Man Called Ove is not a great novel in the literary sense, but it is a very good novel in the human sense: it is honest about grief, funny about loneliness, and generous in its insistence that even the most fortified person can be reached by the right kind of intrusion.