A Man Called Ove

Chapter 5 lays out details regarding Ove’s background, specifically his childhood and how he met his wife. It’s evident she meant a lot to him. She was a contrast to him: “He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had” (33). Both of Ove’s parents died quite young. His mother worked at a chemicals plant and was a smoker; she died when Ove was only 7. He and his father carried on together, missing the mother but finding comfort in one another.

Ove always admired his father. He “never raised his fists” and is described as “quiet but kind” (34). He worked at the railways where he proved to have an excellent knowledge of engines—despite never having finished school. When a railway director has car trouble on his daughter’s wedding day, he sends for Ove’s father, who fixes the car. Months later, the railway director gives Ove’s father an old ’92 Saab.

When he’s older, Ove helps his father at the railway. One day, Ove spies a wallet on the ground at the same time as a rough and mean guy, Tom, does. Tom wants to steal the wallet, but Ove grabs it first. It seems Tom might hit the young boy to get it from him, but then Ove’s father arrives and steps in. He asks Ove what he wants to do with the wallet, and Ove tells him he’d like to give it to the lost-and-found. His father is proud.

Ove’s father dies in a railroad accident when Ove is 16. Ove then goes on to work for the railways as well, for five years. Then he meets his wife: “[O]ne morning he boarded a train and saw her for the first time. That was the first time he’d laughed since his father’s death” (40). 

Chapter 6 finds Ove’s plans for suicide derailed yet again by more neighborhood drama. He reiterates that he’s prepared everything, down to paying the undertakers and washing his coffee cup. Then he gets into altercations with not one but two neighbors.

First, Ove sees an errant bike lying loose outside, so he locks it in the bike shed. A teenage boy neighbor, Adrian, protests that he was working to fix the bike. Ove counters that this can’t be true because it’s a girl’s bike. However, the bike belongs to the young man’s girlfriend, who is standing right behind him. The girl also lives on the same street and is the daughter of “those communists who pushed through the garbage sorting reform” (44). Ove tells Adrian he can get the bike from the bike shed where it belongs; the youth calls him a “grumpy old bastard” (44).

Next Ove gets into an altercation with “Blonde Weed” (45), the younger girlfriend of the 40-year-old divorced man, Anders, who always goes jogging by Ove’s house (which also annoys him). The young woman is throwing stones at a cat that has attacked her small dog, Prince—or “Mutt,” as Ove refers to it. Ove protests because she’s throwing the stones near his property: “If you throw that stone in my property, I’ll throw you into your garden!” (46).

The woman huffs off, saying she will tell Anders. After she’s gone, Ove tries to shoo the cat off, but it doesn’t have any interest in his directives. Exasperated by everything, Ove goes inside and slams the door: “Because it’s enough now. Now Ove is going to die” (48).