I liked this book way more than I thought I would.

I’m such a sucker. Two books in a row have turned me into a dripping snot monster. Well, to be fair, I think I cried harder at this one than I otherwise would have because I’d cried so hard at Code Name Verity the day before. I was all prepped to be emotional; all my systems were primed. At least this was a happy cry. Way better than that ‘OH MY GOD THIS IS SO SAD MY HEART IS DYING’ crying I did on that other book.

This was a book club pick I wouldn’t have read on my own, since I find myself in my dotage being really weirdly suspicious of regular old fiction. I don’t know what my deal is. It’s like I think these books are just waiting there to pounce on me and use their generic plot manipulations on me, just to get me to feeeeel things. I don’t really have a basis for this behavior. Anyway, I wouldn’t have picked this up because I would have been too busy reading about crimes or spaceships or unicorns or whatever. Glad I did though. It was cute, but not so cute that I rolled my eyes. (The eye-rolling litmus test is very important in these kinds of books.)

So there’s this guy called Ove, and he’s extremely grumpy and hates everyone. Thinks we’re all idiots with our newfangled notions, and nobody knows how to do anything properly anymore. He lives in a row-housing community in Sweden, and he has safely disdained all his neighbors for years now. The inciting incident in the book here is Ove getting new next-door neighbors (“foreigners”) who introduce themselves by backing a trailer into his house and then running over his mailbox.

SPOILERS You find out pretty quickly that Ove’s wife has died, and he’s decided that six months was enough time, and he’s going to join her by killing himself. In a series of farcical accidents, every (legitimate) attempt he makes to off himself goes awry, and he gets pulled further in to his neighbor’s lives END SPOILERS.

I expected it all to be very cloying and sentimental, with puppies and rainbows, and Ove learning how to be a good person and blah blah UGHH. But that’s not exactly how it plays out. Ove never stops being Ove, and his misanthropy and grumpiness and disregard for other people (while still finding himself compelled to help them) lends a thick coating of bitter humor to what would most definitely otherwise have been one of those dreaded overly optimistic stories I can’t really deal with anymore. I need my stories to have a real human bite to go along with my real human kindness.

My experience with this book has convinced me to try Backman’s other books as well, but no idea when I will be getting around to them. I do have lots of murders and dragons and planets to read about.