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).