A Man Called Ove – Cartoons capture something very real about being human.

This book is a cartoon.  It is a very good cartoon, but a cartoon nonetheless.  It is not literally a cartoon - it is a novel.  It tells an emotionally evocative tale about a loveable 58 year old Swedish curmudgeon, filling in his back story at the same time that it moves him forward into a brave new world that he has no interest in entering.  After the death of his wife and the loss of his job – the two things that gave meaning to his life, he would just as soon end his life.  Ove is not given to thinking deeply (and he hardly talks at all – he is taciturn) – but he longs to reunite with his wife and the plot follows him as he botches one suicide attempt after another after another – something that seems highly improbable given this man’s extreme competence in the world of things.

I found myself envying Ove as I was reading about him.  He is a character – and I have often wished that I were a character – life would be much easier if that were the case.  Characters (and here I guess I really mean curmudgeonly characters) don’t have to think about other's feelings – they don’t have to weigh and sift and measure – they are action prone, judgmental and decisive.  I remember one of the stated goals of a very early treatment that I was in – group therapy in high school – was to reduce manipulative behavior.  A curmudgeon wouldn’t need this type of treatment – he just says what he thinks and acts in order to get what he wants.  They might need to learn a little bit of social manipulation – and social nicety.  Charm school might be more important than group therapy for Ove.

I was envious, though, on another level.  Ove ends up becoming a kind of unwitting Pied Piper, drafting various people in his wake, including the local newspaper reporter.  He is both a minor hero and a minor celebrity – neither of which he has any interest in being.  I, on the other hand, would love to have little children light up around me, found a gang, and be written up in the paper for being a hero.  I am able to live vicariously through the parts of Ove’s life that he would just as soon do without.  Ove and I seem to be made of very different stuff.

I cared about Ove in another way.  As we learn his back story, Ove has pluck.  He lost his mother at a very early age and then his father died before he finished school.  Ove took over his father’s job at the railroad, and learned how to fix the dilapidated house his parents left him by working evenings in construction where the workers, after telling him what a dummy he was, would teach him how to do carpentry, wiring and plumbing.  Meanwhile he built his muscles and became more and more taciturn, especially after he was swindled out of insurance money and the white shirts prevented him from fighting the fire that consumed his house after he saved the grandchild next door.  The white shirts wanted to condemn his property to build a suburb and the fire was convenient for them.

Despite all the hardship, Ove maintained a desire to live – indeed to live right.  His father taught him basic morals and, despite the corruption around him, Ove stayed true to them.  Ove’s courtship of his wife is a truly lovely thing.  He becomes a puppy dog following a beautiful and well-read woman who had a father much like him – she could appreciate his silence and devotion and he became a willing and appreciative audience for her.  She directed the relationship – and him.  His relationship with her gave his life meaning, but more importantly joy.  And he made the mechanical aspects of her life easy in return.  She, for her part, loved him, but was puzzled by him and his taciturn ways.

Ove’s primary male relationship is with the neighbor- another curmudgeon who, instead of driving a Saab, drives a Volvo, and then goes and buys a BMW.  Well, there can be no reasoning with a man like that.  Or so we think at first.  The relationship – its ups downs – gets fleshed out in the back story that is told in chapters that alternate with what is currently occurring.  As is gets fleshed out, it becomes somewhat more real – but these characters never become three dimensional.  I think what Backman, the author of the book, is attempting to do is to have the characters come alive inside the person reading the book.  We are intended to feel what Ove can’t or won’t feel.  We do Ove’s emotional work for him – as his wife likely did when he was alive – imagining his inner states even when he can’t quite do that himself.

This occurs in my treatment of men with some regularity.  I experience them as closed – unavailable.  I may have trouble following what they are saying in sessions – and may find myself getting sleepy as I listen to them.  Then, if the treatment goes well, I begin to wake up.  I find things of interest in their inner worlds.  They begin to relate emotionally lively material.  The task of the treatment – and perhaps the task that Ove accomplishes in this book – is to be able to own the feelings that are warded off – for the patient to begin to feel the excitement that I am feeling – for them to begin to care about themselves as a person – to believe that they have a subjectivity – an inner life – that is of interest to them – and potentially to others.  They may also become interested in the inner lives of those around them.  This awakening is more than just a return to a former way of functioning, it is frequently a discovery of a whole new way of being. 

Ove gets dragged kicking and screaming into a new world by his neighbors – and primarily by the neighbor across the street – a woman from Iran named Parvenah.  She cajoles and demands and goes toe to toe with him  Meanwhile, he also connects up with a stray cat, a couple of stray boys – including one who is bent (presumably a British euphemism for gay – having this book translated by a Brit gives it an odd foreign feel – it should feel foreign – it is about Sweden – but it shouldn’t feel British) and the aforementioned newspaper reporter.  They stand with Ove as he fights various forms of despotism in the form of various men in white shirts, a bit of bad luck, and truckers who are covered in tattoos.

This cartoon is well constructed.  I found myself laughing and crying and rooting Ove on – all the while feeling manipulated myself.  Backman wanted me to feel these things.  He was putting them in me.  He was almost as cold and calculating as Stephen Spielberg was when he created E.T.  And yet I was willing to have him do this – and actually think that this was an organic experience.  Because, as I alluded to earlier, I don’t think that people like Ove actually can tolerate the feelings that are stirred in them.  They end up stirring feelings in the people around them – because, and this is a weird truism from I know not where – feelings need to be felt in order to be real.  And if our feelings aren’t real, then we aren’t either.  So we act on the world in such a way that it (actually the people in it) feel our feelings if we ourselves are unable to stand that.  And when we do that, we come to life.

If we are lucky, we find someone like Parvenah who isn’t cowed by our feelings and doesn’t walk around on eggshells around us, but metabolizes our feelings and then returns them to us in a form that we can tolerate.  As we hear about our own feelings from this other. we begin feeling the feelings are not quite as nasty as we imagine them (and as she experiences them) and this allows us to imagine that we might not be quite as toxic as we have presumed ourselves to be – and as others may have experienced us as being. 

As a therapist, what I like about working with people like Ove is that they don’t realize that they are sending these feelings out into the world – and would be both astonished and embarrassed if they realized that they were.  Their intent is to be autonomous.  The suicide attempts demonstrate this – as carefully scripted as he could make each one, with plastic laid about to prevent a mess and instructions for what to with everything left behind make them seem like they are to have as little impact on others as possible.  But the intent of them – to reunite Ove with his beloved wife – betrays the underlying wish to impact – and connect with – the world.  The autonomy of these guys looks like it is how they are made – but they, in fact, are made of the same stuff that we all are – and, in spite of themselves, they actually want desperately to be connected.  When Ove figures out how to connect with Parvenah’s kids, not just by being pestered by them, but by actually sharing interests with them, we see the beginnings of the feeling states that will make life rich for Ove and we are very pleased for him.

And this is what transforms guys like this.  And it is just fine that he is presented as a cartoon.  In fact, that is in some ways useful.  Were he painted more particularly, we might diagnose him as having an obsessional style – or being Aspergery, or as a schizoid type.  Or we might even call him bipolar with angry affect.  The point is that he is all and none of those things.  What he needs, regardless of how we “diagnose” him, is to connect with the world around him.  As malformed as he has been by fortune and DNA, the treatment he needs is organic - to heal the internal rifts that have been formed so that he can be comfortable with himself - and with others.  Fortunately, he finds a group of people who like him and who he can take a liking to.  He becomes humanized by those around him.  He could also go into a therapist’s office – and you’d be surprised how many guys do.  They realize they aren’t happy and they’d like to know how to get there.  Frequently, at least in my experience, they do become happy not because they are cured of Asperger’s, or schizoid personality, or obsessive personality disorder – they are still very much themselves – but they become able to use themselves to better connect with those around them, as Ove does.

This cartoon, like Charlie Brown, or your favorite cartoon, tells us something very important – and very endearing – about ourselves and the people in our world.  It also translates well to the screen.  The reluctant wife and I watched the Swedish version with subtitles last night.  The movie is quite faithful to the book, though many details don’t make it in.  And the actor (Rolf Lassgård) brings a pathos to the part that is lovely.  I was unprepared for how the violence in the book, which seems muted as I read it, became quite shocking in the film – especially given that this is a nice quiet little story about a Swedish man and his wife living in a quiet middle class suburb.

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