A Man Called Ove

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012

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Chapters 25-27Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 25 Summary: “A Man Called Ove and a Piece of Corrugated Iron”

Chapter 25 shows that Ove is still on a mission to commit suicide and opens with him contemplating taking some of Sonja’s old painkillers: “He thinks about how it would feel, doing it this way. He has never taken any narcotics” (188). He seems more hesitant than he was with his other attempts, however.

Before he can proceed, he hears the Cat Annoyance and Blonde Weed’s dog, Prince, getting into a fight outside. He goes to intervene. He finds Blonde Weed preparing to kick the cat, but she stops when Ove appears. He doesn’t even say anything to her, although his stony face intimidates her. She takes Prince and leaves. Ove brings the cat inside.

Then he goes to see Rune and Anita to borrow a sheet of corrugated iron. Unexpectedly, Rune answers the door. Even more unexpectedly, Rune (despite his Alzheimer’s) recognizes Ove: “Both men, once as close as men of that sort could be, stare at each other. One of them a man who refuses to forget the past, and one who can’t remember it at all” (192).

Ove explains to Anita what he wants and says Rune would surely have what he needs in the shed out back. She agrees to let him check; he finds a sheet of corrugated iron, as expected. Before he leaves, he shows a moment of compassion, telling Anita to come by if she needs help with the radiators. Ove tells her, “The cat and me are at home” (194).

He then takes the sheet of metal and constructs a trap for Prince with it. He plans to connect the metal sheet to a battery and hide it under the snow. When Prince stands on it and pees, he’ll get an electric shock: “‘Like a bolt of lightning up your urethra’ Ove says. The cat looks at him for a long time. As if to say: ‘You’re not serious, are you?’” (195). Ove glumly agrees with the cat that it’s too much and dismantles the trap.

Chapter 26 Summary: “A Man Called Ove and a Society Where No One Can Repair a Bicycle Anymore”

Ove is at home making bets with the cat on when the mailman will arrive. He used to do this with Rune and then, after he and Rune had their falling out, he tried it with Sonja, but she didn’t understand the rules. Today he wins and the cat loses.

As he goes to open the door, he finds Adrian, the teenaged boy from the neighborhood—he’s also a mailman. The last time he encountered Adrian, it was in an altercation about the bicycle he was trying to fix for his girlfriend. The two share an awkward exchange; then the teen asks if Sonja was Ove’s wife.

Adrian tells Ove that Sonja was his teacher and the only teacher he ever had who didn’t think he was stupid. She even got him reading Shakespeare:

And then they both stand there, the fifty-nine-year-old and the teenager […] kicking at the snow. As if they were kicking a memory back and forth, a memory of a woman who insisted on seeing more potential in certain men than they saw in themselves. Neither of them knows what to do with their shared experience (198).

Finally, Ove breaks the awkwardness by asking about Adrian’s bicycle. Adrian explains he was fixing it for his girlfriend—or, rather, a girl he hopes will become his girlfriend. He has no clue what he’s doing, so Ove offers to help him. Ove then goes to Parvaneh and asks if she’s ready for her first driving lesson.

Chapter 27 Summary: “A Man Called Ove and a Driving Lesson”

Ove and Parvaneh have their driving lesson. To Ove’s horror, she doesn’t even know where the clutch is. The cat, now Ove’s constant companion, accompanies them: “The cat sits in the back seat and looks as if it wishes, with intensity, that cats knew how to strap on safety belts” (203).

The driving lesson is difficult and stressful. Parvaneh pulls up to a red light and nervous when a Jeep with two young men, with shaved heads and tattooed throats, pulls up behind her. When the light turns green and Parvaneh can’t get the car moving, the young men honk their horn repeatedly. Parvaneh gets so stressed out that she cries, which is out of character, as she’s usually calm and collected.

Ove steps into “hero” mode. He gets out of the car and goes up to the young men, physically pulling one of them out of their car and pressing him up against the side, his “eyes black with anger” (207). The young man is so shocked by Ove’s strength and fury that he doesn’t say a word. Ove gets back in the car and gives Parvaneh a pep talk:

‘You’ve given birth to two children and soon you’ll be squeezing out a third. You’ve come here from a land far away and most likely you fled war and persecution and all sorts of other nonsense You’ve learned a new language’ (207).

Ove’s insightful and compassionate speech resonates with Parvaneh. Ove gets her to stop crying, and they continue the lesson.

Chapters 25-27 Analysis

Ove’s capacity and willingness to help others grows significantly in Chapters 25 to 27. In Chapter 25, he offers to help Anita with the radiators. In Chapter 26, he offers to help the teenaged neighbor with his bicycle project. In Chapter 27, he takes Parvaneh for a driving lesson. It’s a huge shift from the beginning, when his only interest was killing himself and certainly not helping other people.

These chapters also show how Sonja continues to influence Ove, even after death. When he speaks with Anita, for example, he notices she is leaning to one side—“Sonja explained about a year ago that it was the hip replacement operation, he remembers” (194). He also sees Anita’s hands shaking: “‘The first stage of multiple sclerosis,’ Sonja had also explained” (194). Sonja is his link to others, even from the past. His interaction with Adrian, who was a student of Sonja’s and informs Ove how much he liked her, also reflects this.

Sonja’s never-ending presence in Ove’s psyche is also reflected in his physical space: Her photos are all over and “everywhere, she looks back at him […] he’s positioned the photographs so they follow him through the house wherever he goes” (190). Despite this prevalent presence, Sonja is not there to guide Ove. The cat seems to step in yet again as a moral compass, such as when Ove dismantles the trap for the dog, Prince:

Not because he doesn’t think those morons deserve a proper electric shock. But because he knows it’s been a while since someone reminded him of the difference between being wicked because one has to be or because one can (195).

Ove’s pep talk for Parvaneh at the end of Chapter 27 notes his change. When he first saw her, he simply thought of her as the “pregnant foreign woman” (28). Now, he concludes with a very Ove-like compliment, “which Parvaneh will always remember as the loveliest compliment he’ll ever give her. ‘Because you are not a complete twit’” (208).