Love, love, love this book. But I also hated it because it made me cry.
I knew it was going to be a really sad book from the very first bit. What else can you expect when all the main character wants to do is kill himself?
You absolutely have to love Ove. Every quality is perfect in him. He is stubborn to the point where you can't help but laugh at him. The whole time I was reading, I just wanted to hug Ove, knowing he'd hate it so much.
I read the back of the book and assumed it would be like Up, minus the floating house and stuff, but it was so much more. Ove was more: more grumpy, more frustrated, more stubborn, more sad, more loving, and more lovable.
The book also had this horribly great dark humor to it; Ove couldn't successfully commit suicide. He wouldn't do something right or a neighbor would interrupt him. And he'd try his best to ignore them or scare them off, but he couldn't because he had a great family surrounding him.
I loved how Backman did the story: every once in a while he'd take his readers back to provide more of Ove's story, making us even sadder as we realized all that he went through. This backstory was very well spread out so that we were never over- or underwhelmed by his past but received information relevant to the current going-ons.
This book ended just as I would've wanted it too: Ove's natural death and a man just like him and his wife move into his house. I love that. It's just perfect and I think Ove would appreciate that.
I also really enjoyed Rune and Ove's relationship. Some days they got along just fine, but one little thing would would set them off again to where they wouldn't speak to each other for years. I enjoyed that we got glimpses of their friendship: enough to answer our questions but still have us wanting mrore of their interactions. And when it counted the most, Ove was right there for Rune, doing whatever he could to beat the men in white suits.
I think that was an interesting theme throughout. I'm sure someone with more knowledge could make some great political discussion on those "men in white suits," but I'll leave that to someone else. I loved that Ove kept saying that those men could not be beat, and we saw that as Ove continued to lose against them: until the end. Ove won and he won in a big way, with the help of his neighbors, of course.
Overall, this is a beautiful story of living life with there around you, standing up for your beliefs and your friends, and forgiving those who have wronged you. I definitely will read this again.
