A Man Called Ove / Fredrik Backman

Ove is the self-appointed neighborhood overseer, making sure that residents and visitors follow the home owners association rules to the letter. His daily routine includes checking to see that the recyclables have been sorted correctly, seeing that motor vehicles do not enter the residential area, and that bikes are properly stored in the bike shed. He takes this role seriously, and it immediately becomes obvious that Ove is an insufferable curmudgeon.

After the recent death of his wife, he contemplates joining her by plotting to take his own life. In a comedy of errors his attempts to do himself in are always foiled by a last-minute interruption that pulls him in closer to the circle of the living. Bit by bit the neighborhood community embraces him, and he is no longer a loner, though he is just as grumpy.

The reader learns of Ove’s upbringing and his marriage via flashbacks, and these vignettes provide important glimpses into why his convictions are the way they are, and what made him the man he is today-- warts and all.

This was a good character-driven novel which reminded me of Anne Tyler. It was quirky and cute, maybe almost too cute (the behavior of the cat, for example, seemed unlikely), but I liked the setting and the neighborhood personalities. It has already been made into a Swedish-language film, which seems to capture the tone of the novel accurately and the movie trailer can be seen by clicking/tapping here.

Comments

And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation. Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...

Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

Peachy Reads

Search This Blog