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A Man Called Ove Essay Theme

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In the novel, A Man Called Ove written by Fredrik Backman, Ove, an old man, is living in Sweden. He lives on a private road in old town homes. His neighbors were old friends, but now they are moving to retirement homes and new more modern people are moving in. Patrick and Parvaneh are one of the new couples that moved in. They have little children and Ove will become very close to them because of traumatic events. ‘White Men” are the authority in the book. They try and come into the neighborhood and take everything away from Ove and his neighbors. Ove lives in a neighborhood with very strict rules that he likes to keep to. For example, motor vehicles are prohibited, so when the new neighbors bring their car in Ove isn’t to happy with them. …show more content…

This becomes important because it is where things begin to spiral into a rush of bad luck for them. The novel takes place in many time frames because it gos from current day to when his father died and he met his dead wife. The main time is in present day when Ove is learning about how to be a good neighbor and learn to adapt to the modern world. When Ove’s wife Sonja dies he is devastated because they have been through so much over the past years. In the beginning, Sonja and Ove took a trip to Spain on vacation, here they got into a bus crash. Sonja was pregnant before they left, but the impact of the bus crash was too much pressure for the baby to handle and the baby died. To add on to the pain, Sonja was paralyzed and would have to be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. As a teacher, Sonja was up on her feet a lot, but the school would not allow Ove to build her a ramp to get into the school. This added to the depressing events that Sonja had been through but it was not ever yet. Government …show more content…

To start off, a part I did not like about the book was the part about Ove’s dad. I felt as though this complicated the plot a lot and was not necessary to the base of the book. It did not need to be added into the book because it had no effect to my understanding of what was happening in the book. If anything it made me more confused because it went back in time, then it came back to the present and it was confusing what time period we were in at the moment. A good part of the book was when Parvaneh was becoming friends with Ove because he needed to get out of his daily routine. Ove needed someone to shake up the life he had been living for many years. I would not recommend this book to adolescents because the book was confusing at some points and the humor was guided towards the adults. Personally, I would read another book by Fredrik Backman because the book was still very well written. I also could understand the book, for the most part. To continue, this book would be better read by adults because the humor was more guided to that age group. Also, this book is still relevant today because people do not live forever. We have to learn to move on from the bad times just like Ove did. When a loved one dies we feel grief, but like Ove we use the people around us to begin to feel better about what happened to us. In conclusion, this was a good book and I would rate it three out of five

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