Monthly Archives: January 2020

A Man Called Ove: Fredrick Backman

25 Saturday Jan 2020

Posted by in Books in translation, Fiction

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Translated from Swedish by Henning Koch

“Ove is fifty-nine. He drives a Saab. He’s the kind of man who points at people he doesn’t like the look of, as if they were burglars and his finger a policeman’s flashlight.”

When we meet him, Ove is trying to buy an iPad and driving the salesman crazy. (He often has that effect on people.) He is a stickler for rules, especially the ones he makes, and finds most people a waste of time.  

But his world is about to change. A new family moves in next door: Parvaneh, an Iranian woman, her husband Patrick and their two young daughters. In spite of himself, the family—especially Parvaneh—become an important part of Ove’s life. As does the mangy cat who haunts his doorstep, and Jimmy, his next-door neighbour (when Jimmy was a child, Ove got rid of the boy’s abusive father). There is also Mirsad, a young gay man who Ove takes in when his father throws him out.

The grumpy man we meet at the beginning of the book is fleshed out little by little, both through his interactions with his neighbours, and through his memories, especially of his adored wife Sonja. She brings light into his life and understands him in a way no one else does. When she dies, Ove can’t see the point of continuing to live.

He sets his affairs in order and tries to kill himself. He is stymied every time, often by his neighbours, who just won’t leave him alone, much to his annoyance: “Considering how they are constantly preventing him from dying, these neighbours of his are certainly not shy when it comes to driving a man to the brink of madness and suicide. That’s for sure”, he grumbles.

I loved the way Fredrick Backman writes about deeply moving events without losing sight of the humour (see the quote above). It is a beautiful portrait of a marriage, a relationship between two people who care deeply for each other but are completely different. Backman brings it alive through little details: “She had a way of folding her index finger into his palm, hiding it inside. And he always felt that nothing in the world was impossible when she did that.” Ove’s pain over the loss of his wife is heart-breaking.

I also loved the relationship between him and Parvaneh. She is a wonderful character—strong, feisty and full of compassion. From being what he sees as an annoying neighbour, she becomes his closest friend and the person he trusts to take care of his affairs after his death.

This book had me laughing and crying and most of all, believing in these people. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

A Haunted House and Other Stories: Virginia Woolf

18 Saturday Jan 2020

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I haven’t read Virginia Woolf for decades, and I had forgotten just how well she writes. I had bought this collection of her short stories in the 1980s, and it was one of the many books I had left behind in my parents’ house when I moved. It has now found its place on my bookshelves again after all these years.

Woolf is better known for her novels—To the Lighthouse, Orlando—but these short stories are gems of observation and character study. It was a delight to rediscover her writing.

Woolf picks up on something mundane and builds a quiet, shattering event from it. A woman sees a black mark on the wall as she looks up from her book and the mark leads to a train of thought about the things she has lost, archaeology and how men make the rules everyone has to live by. In a train, a woman makes up a story about the woman sitting across from her; a new dress meant to give a woman confidence makes her feel even more insecure; a marriage falls apart when the man turns away from the secret game the couple used to play; and a man mourning the death of his wife finds his world turned upside down by her diary.

These are lives in miniature, with tiny details that reveal heartbreaks, unfulfilled desires and regrets. Woolf is known for writing streams of consciousness, and the way she follows a thought as it flutters, alights on something for a while and then moves on is exactly how thought processes work. This is writing to be savoured, not rushed through. If you haven’t read her yet, start with these and then go to her books.

Go, Went, Gone: Jenny Erpenbeck

04 Saturday Jan 2020

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Translated from German by Susan Bernofsky

“War destroys everything…your family, your friends, the place where you lived, your work, your life. When you become foreign…you don’t have a choice. You don’t know where to go. You don’t know anything. I can’t see myself anymore, can’t see the child I used to be.”

The voices here are of African migrants, men who have risked everything to escape danger and to try to make a better life for themselves in Germany. We see them through the eyes of Richard, a retired classics professor living in Berlin. Richard grew up in East Germany and is still dealing with the reunification of the country. His sense of displacement is, to a much greater degree, echoed by that of the migrants.

It all starts when Richard walks past a group of African migrants demonstrating on Aleksanderplatz. He decides to learn more about these men and under the guise of doing research, he gets to know them. Most of them have made the dangerous crossing over the Mediterranean from Libya and have seen people die. Many of them barely speak German, but Richard’s knowledge of English and Italian helps him.

Little by little, we learn their stories. There is Rashid from northern Nigeria, whose boat capsized—he couldn’t swim and survived by hanging on to a cable, and watched his fellow passengers die. There is Awad from Ghana, who lived with his father in Tripoli, Libya. But father was shot during the civil war, and Awad was captured by the soldiers and beaten. “If you’re lucky, you get beaten, if you’re unlucky, you get shot”, says someone to comfort him. Then the soldiers put the prisoners on a boat and said anyone who tried to get off the boat would be shot. Richard asks him whether they were Gaddafi’s men or rebels. “We didn’t know. They all had the same uniform. … In any case, no one was on our side. Even though I grew up in Libya. Libya was my country.”

Sometimes the migrants find it hard to explain their lives to someone who comes from such a different world, such as the young Tuareg from Niger: “Why should he tell a stranger that he doesn’t know why he never had any parents? … Why should he tell him that he doesn’t know if his parents are still alive? There was fighting going on at the time when he was born. Maybe his mother or his father was among the people buried alive beneath the sand by the Nigerian soldiers, or hacked to pieces or burned alive.”

The migrants, however, are not welcome in Germany. The Kafkaesque system discourages them from staying, as Richard finds out when he tries to help them find work. Like so many other refugees and migrants throughout the world, they want to contribute to society but are prevented from doing so by the system.

It took me a little while to get into the book. In the early part of the book, I felt that the migrants’ stories were like so many we have heard—I didn’t feel that the characters were real. But it was well worth staying with because Jenny Erpenbeck does round them out and by the end, they are utterly convincing. And one other gripe: Erpenbeck refers to the festival as Eid Mubarak, which is like talking about Merry Christmas instead of Christmas. Eid Mubarak is the Eid greeting. It is jarring and could have easily been avoided.

This book puts human faces to one of the biggest crises of the 21st century. It is also a character study of a man whose little life is transformed by the migrants. Just knowing them forces him out of his isolation and makes him a part of a community. Which just reinforces the fact that the “other” is not someone to be feared but someone who could just enrich your world.