Headline: Grumpy Late-Fifties Male Grouses About Novel Depicting Grumpy Late-Fifties Male.

No, I didn’t like it. Serious cognitive disconnect. Nothing makes sense: not the timelines, nor the relationships, nor the motivations. Ove is not a Grouchy Old Man With A Secret Heart Of Gold; he is, I think, a not-very-kind person’s idea of what one would look like. Nasty, spiteful, shallow, with serious anger issues. His barbs and petty acts of revenge aren’t funny, they’re just mean. OK, so he’s just a fictional character, but the more I read, the more I felt that his words and actions were a reflection of the author, like those people who blurt out “you’re fat, ha ha, j/k.” I hope I’m wrong. I know nothing about Backman, and dearly hope I’m mistaken, but this first impression was a sour one. I have no desire to read his work again.

The relationships make no sense either; they come off more as wishful thinking than real human interactions. (I’m speaking solely of humans here. The cat, that’s completely off-the-wall bizarre, let’s just ignore that.) I have to assume that Backman was going for heartwarming, but for me it went straight into bathetic. Then again I’m just a grumpy, often-unkind, late-fifties male.