A Man Called Ove

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012

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Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 10 Summary: “A Man Who Was Ove and a House That Ove Built”

Chapter 10 jumps back in time to provide more of Ove’s backstory, with the starting point being one week after his 18th birthday. On this day he goes to buy his first car, a blue Saab ‘93. He sells the old Saab ‘92 he inherited from his dad to help pay for it.

Ove’s neighborhood where he lives in his parental home is gentrifying. He refers to the new arrivals as “the suits,” and it’s clearly a contentious relationship (mirroring his present-day situation in his current neighborhood). “The suits” would like to see Ove and his rundown house leave, but he is stubborn.

He starts receiving letters from the municipal council (a Swedish government body controlling housing) regarding the house; they want to buy it from him to make room for new development. He refuses and gets a job in construction so that he can learn how to renovate the ramshackle structure while keeping his job as a night cleaner for the railroads.

After Ove completes the house, a fake insurance salesman defrauds him out of money. He claims to work for a company and sells Ove a policy; Ove pays him in cash. It’s only later after Ove’s house has burned down and he contacts the insurance company to collect a payout that he discovers the man was a swindler.

The fire occurs when an elderly next-door neighbor’s house catches fire. The old man and woman make it out, but their grandson is inside. Ove can choose to get a water house and defend his own house from the nearing flames—or to help the old man get his grandson out of the burning house. He gets the grandson out.

Meanwhile, the firefighters have arrived but claim that, because Ove’s house straddles two municipal districts, they need approval from some higher-ups before they can diffuse the flames. They won’t let Ove fight the fire either; a man in a white shirt stops him, saying “rules are rules” (84). Ove must watch as the house burns down completely.

Chapter 11 Summary: “A Man Called Ove and a Lanky One Who Can’t Open a Window Without Falling off a Ladder”

Chapter 11 returns to the present day. Ove is planning yet again to kill himself, this time via carbon monoxide poisoning using his Saab. First, however, he goes for a last “inspection tour” of the neighborhood: “Just because he’s dying today doesn’t mean that the vandals should be given free rein” (86).

A white Škoda interrupts Ove’s morning routine. He chases after the car, insulting the driver and shouting that his part of the neighborhood is a car-free zone. The councilman—a bureaucratic figure—behind the wheel ignores him. He was visiting Anita and Rune; Anita mentioned previously that officials had threatened to take Rune from her and put him in a care home.

Back at home, Ove makes his preparations for suicide. He’s sitting in his car with the engine running, pumping fumes into the vehicle with a plastic hose attached to the exhaust, when he hears a banging on the garage door. He gets out of the car and opens the garage door so violently that it hits Parvaneh in the face, giving her a bloody nose. Her husband Patrick has fallen off a ladder and is en route to the hospital. She and the children couldn’t fit in the ambulance and need a ride.

When she explains that she doesn’t have a driver’s license, Ove is flabbergasted: “‘How old are you?’ Ove asks, almost fascinated now” (93). It’s the first time Ove has shown any sort of curiosity towards his neighbors. Parvaneh gets Ove to drive them when she mentions taking a bus. Ove responds, “You can’t trust bloody buses. The drivers are always drunks” (93).

The specter of Sonja clinches it: “Ove knows very well that there’ll be no end of nagging from his wife if the last thing Ove does in this life is to give a pregnant woman a nosebleed and then abandon her to take the bus” (95). He goes and removes the evidence of his suicide attempt from the Saab so that he can drive them to the hospital.

Chapter 12 Summary: “A Man Who Was Ove and One Day He Had Enough”

Chapter 12 again jumps back in time. After his parental house burns down, Ove sleeps in the Saab. Three days later, men in “white shirts” (98) arrive. They strong-arm him into finally selling the property now that the house is gone:

He hated those men in white shirts. He couldn’t remember having hated anyone before, but now it was like a ball of fire inside. Ove’s parents had bought this house. Ove had grown up here. […] His father had taught him everything there was to know about a Saab engine here (98).

Ove then rents a room in a boarding house in town. He still has his job cleaning trains, but he quits the day job in construction. In the boarding house he runs into Tom, the man who got him fired from his first railroad job. While Ove is in the shower, Tom steals Ove’s watch—his father’s watch. This is the breaking point: Ove confronts Tom, forcibly takes the watch back from him, and punches him: “Maybe it was because Tom had put the blame on him for the theft in the carriage. Maybe it was the fire. Maybe it was the bogus insurance agent. Or the white shirts. Or maybe it was just enough now” (100).

Ove then decides to try for the military because the institution’s regimented lifestyle could be a perfect fit for him. However, the doctors discover that he has a congenital heart condition and prohibit his enlistment. They repeatedly tell him that “rules are rules” (102). This is a notably low moment for Ove: He is “more despondent than at any time since his father’s death” (102). This is the state he is in when he meets his wife only a few months later: “And then there was no more peace and quiet for Ove” (102).

Chapters 10-12 Analysis

As these chapters dive more into Ove’s backstory, his love of order and routine becomes more understandable. He’s lost his parents and then the family house that he shared with them. Given this chaos, it makes sense that Ove would gravitate towards structure. He thinks he will find an ordered lifestyle in the military but is again disappointed. However, he does find comfort in building:

He’d discovered that he liked houses. Maybe mostly because they were understandable. They could be calculated and drawn on paper. […] Houses were fair, they gave you what you deserved. Which, unfortunately, was more than one could say about people (80).

These chapters highlight Ove’s stance as the constant outsider. He doesn’t fit in with his colleagues at the railroad job or the construction job, always being a quiet but hard-working person in the periphery. In Chapter 10, he doesn’t fit into the gentrifying society developing around him and his family home:

It was a time of change in the country [Sweden]. People moved and found new jobs and bought televisions, and the newspapers starting talking about a ‘middle class.’ Ove didn’t quite know what this was, but he was well aware that he was not a part of it (76).

Ove’s house burning down represents yet another moment of others prioritizing bureaucracy over what is “right” in Ove’s world. A man in a white shirt—the “white shirts” become Ove’s symbol and moniker for people of bureaucratic authority—stops him from trying to save his own home, saying “rules are rules” (84). Following this, Ove has his break-through moment where he punches Tom.

It takes Sonja, a woman who is the opposite of Ove—the “color” to his “black and white” (33)—to captivate him: “He never understood why she chose him. She only loved abstract things like music and books and strange words. Ove was a man entirely filled with tangible things” (96).