Two Best Sellers That Seem
to Have A Lot in Common
Flitting on and off both The Washington Post and The
New York Times best seller lists are A
Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman and The
Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George.
On the surface, these two titles would seem to have much in common:
- · Both are contemporary, translated European novels.
- · Both feature a protagonist who is a man in his fifties (and in both cases referred to as “an old man” – with which I take issue!).
- · Both men have lost the love of their lives and have been reduced to hulls of their former selves due to depression.
- · Both are buoyed and brought to life by neighbors who insinuate themselves into the characters’ lives.
- · Both novels end on a happy note, the protagonists having found new reasons to live and to live fully.
The two books are seemingly similar in plot and
character, but in the hands of two different authors, Backman’s Swedish novel
is a much better read.
I really wanted to like The Little Paris Bookshop. It has all the right ingredients: a Paris setting, a bookseller who runs
his shop out of a barge on the Seine called The Literary Apothecary, love lost
and love found, but as the Washington
Post reviewer said, “As with many fancy-looking cakes, under the meringue
and the frosting this novel tastes like artificially flavored cardboard.” Jean Perdu is a 51 year old Parisian
who has, for the last 20 years, been in mourning over the loss of the love of
his life, Manon. Through
flashbacks, we gradually learn the story of their 5 year relationship: they meet on a bus (train?) and,
although she has a fiancé (later her husband) back in Provence, she carries on
a passionate affair with Jean, declaring that she is the type of woman who
needs more than one man. (This is presented as if this is acceptable…and
believable.) Jean, so in love with
Manon, willingly accepts the conditions of their affair, going months at a time
without seeing her, living for the passionate nights they share when she
returns to Paris. (Maybe there are real people who would
put up with this; do you know any? ) The love scenes are definitely TMI (“He
had run naked and howling up and down the fine white sand beaches,” “Manon’s hair dangled over her breasts
as she rode naked” )and often melodramatic. The relationship seems like it was all about physical
passion. Manon disappears one day
and the letter in which she explains her leave-taking has remained unopened
these twenty years. It is only
when Jean gives his new neighbor, Catherine, a table, that the letter (stuck in
the table’s drawer) resurfaces and Catherine insists he open it, that he
discovers what a true fool he has been.
I won’t give away the contents of the letter, but I found it totally
unconvincing that the “love of your life” walks out and he doesn’t read the
letter of explanation? Who does
that? Jean, in a twenty year funk,
has given away most of his furniture, living stoically like a monk. “Pathetic” is the word that comes to
mind here.
The reading of the letter prompts Jean to free his barge
from its moorings and set off down the Seine towards the south of France. Again, melodramatic.
He hasn’t steered a barge in 20 years, brings no money with him and
doesn’t seem entirely clear on what he will do when he gets to Provence. Max, his young neighbor, who is paralyzed
by the success of his first book, impulsively (as well as literally) jumps
aboard to accompany Jean, inadvertently losing his wallet and cell phone in the
water. The pair bumble along the
river, taking handouts from strangers until they can get to a town with a
bank. Along the way, they pick up
an Italian chef and later a woman who is an eccentric bookseller who turns out
to have written the one book that has emotionally sustained Jean throughout
these twenty years. Wow. What a coincidence.
I won’t give away any more of the plot. Despite the
self-inflicted nature of Jean’s misery, the reader does root for him to turn
his life around.
The titular Ove is initially characterized as an OCD
curmudgeon who patrols his neighborhood every morning, looking for infractions
of community rules and taking notes. He drives a Saab and has always driven a
Saab and he says of his sometime friend and sometime enemy, “Rune drove a Volvo, but later he
bought a BMW. You just couldn’t
reason with a person who behaved liked that” (50). His outrage over the new neighbors who not only bring a car
into the part of the development where no cars are allowed, but proceed to back
a trailer over his mailbox and into his flowerbed is comical. It was at that point, that I began to
snicker and to realize that the book has some hilarious moments, humor which
grows out of both Ove’s eccentricities but also from the situational irony that
occurs later.
The tone, rather than melodramatic, is straightforward
and characterized by dry humor.
Chapter titles drolly hint at the coming narrative: “Chapter 12: A Man Who Was Ove and One Day He Had Enough,” “Chapter
32: A Man Called Ove Isn’t Running
a Damned Hotel.” Humor also arises
from the fact that Ove is a very black and white thinker. For example, a “rumble” occurs in a
flower shop when he hands over a coupon that says “2 plants for 50
kronor.” Ove only wants one plant
and cannot see why it should cost 39 instead of 25 kronor. “It took Ove fifteen minutes to make
him [the manager] see sense and agree that Ove was right” (32). After recently
reading a memoir about by a man with Asperger’s, I wonder if Ove isn’t also
Asperger’s, a characteristic that makes his social awkwardness and boxy
thinking less intentional and stubborn and more complex. Ove emerges as three-dimensional while
Jean is a paper cutout consumed with a romanticized memory of the past.
Ove is gradually humanized for the reader through
flashbacks of his youth that reveal his earnestness and stamina under challenging
circumstances and later through his marriage and early years in the
community. The story also takes on
a certain poignancy as you realize that when Ove makes a comment to Sophia and
the line that follows is, “His wife doesn’t answer,” it is because his wife is
dead. Turns out Ove is depressed
about the death of his wife and he has just been unceremoniously let go from his
job. The fact that he still mourns six months later is understandable both
because of his great love for Sophia but also because his social awkwardness
and peculiar world view have kept Ove’s social world very narrow. Ove, unable to rebound, has decided to
kill himself. This would seem to make A
Man Called Ove a dark novel, and the reader cringes at his preparations to
hang himself (his best suit, a tarp on the rug to keep it from getting dirty,
funeral instructions in an envelope), but this attempt and each subsequent one
(breathing exhaust fumes in a closed garage, shooting himself, taking an
overdose) are thwarted by the serendipitous interruptions of his neighbors, and
as you realize that Backman is not going to allow his character to do himself
in, this becomes actually quite funny.
Ove’s reaction is part of it:
“Considering how they are constantly preventing him from dying, these
neighbors of his are certainly not shy when it comes to driving a man to the
brink of madness and suicide” (160).
Also humorous are the names that Ove privately calls some
of his neighbors. The live-in
girlfriend of Anders (“a recent arrival, probably not lived here more than four
or five years at most…Also drives an Audi. . .might have known. Self-employed people and other idiots
all drive Audis” (10) is referred to as “The Blond Weed”. The husband in the new neighbor couple
is “The Lanky One.” The stray cat
that insinuates its way into his house and then his affections is “The Cat
Annoyance.” Any government or
bureaucratic individuals are “white shirts.”
Parvaneh, the pregnant Iranian new neighbor, at some
point picks up on what is going on with Ove and begins to purposely insert
herself into his life, not unlike the cat. It is, in fact, because of her, that Ove begins to connect
to other people again and give up on his suicidal thoughts. Together with the cat, Ove’s hard shell
thaws. When he is planning the
perfect revenge on Blond Weed who lets her dog piss on his walk – wires hidden
under the snow that will jolt the dog, “like a bolt of lightning up your
urethra” (222) – “The cat looks at him for a long time. As if to say: ‘You’re not serious, are
you?’ . . .Ove disconnects his trap and muses that “it’s been a while since
someone reminded him of the difference between being wicked because one has to
be or because one can” (222).
