Some years ago, I was in the second round of interviews for a pastoral position with a significant church in Chicago. This church was in the process of launching several new campuses, and my neighborhood was their next target for a new site. They wanted this campus to have two pastors on staff that reflected the primary ethnic-groups residing in Logan Square: an older Hispanic community and a younger, millennial-aged white constituency. As is customary, I was given a few minutes to ask questions of my interviewers, and my first was this:
“Hispanics value the care of their elders. Your church has a younger membership, so how do you intend to serve the Abuelas and Abuelos and make them part of your community?"
The response was bewildering. The pastor reminded me that the church’s brand was younger, that it was part of their “DNA,” and he suggested that no plans would be significantly changed to serve or integrate the elderly. Inexplicable! A church interested in reaching, serving, and representing all of Logan Square wasn’t considering the longstanding Abuelo/a who sits on the porch every day to watch the neighborhood. The sad truth is his response reflects the real experiences of elderly people frequently ignored, even cast out, by the rapidly developing city around them. Thanks to Fredrik Backman, however, these experiences are set, named, and reconsidered in the fictional life of his original character, Ove, and his story exposes just how vital elders are to the city we make.
Introducing A Man Called Ove
Ove is the titular character of Fredrik Backman’s first novel. He is a man of principle who believes a thing should be done or abstained simply because its right. “Men are what they are because of what they do. Not what they say,” says Ove. He’s a misunderstood widower labeled a curmudgeon, and he’s forced out of society completely, left alone to contemplate his presumed uselessness and plan his suicide. This is Ove’s condition when the reader meets him. He’s alone “in a world where he no longer [understands] the language,” dejected, and preparing to take his life. The trope of the old hero forgotten by society and broken by an untimely lost is used by Backman to bring readers near to the experience of this bristly old Swede. Ove is a hero. But, Ove is lost.
In this story, as in others, the hero must be found and called back from his exile before the villains can be defeated. However, it is his calling and foes that reveal the unique insights latent in Ove’s story. Here are three of the many lessons learned from Ove and his neighborhood.
Seen and Known
It takes someone who knows the margins to bring someone back into the fold. Ove and his neighbors are living a fragmented experience of community when the story begins. Rune and Anita, Ove’s oldest friends, no longer speak to him. His neighbor across the street, Anders, is judged from a distance and suspected of being a dubious character. Where there was once a vibrant community of neighbors, there is now only echoes of an old life which only serve to further ostracize the characters. That is, until the arrival of a certain “crazy, pregnant foreign woman and her utterly ungovernable family.”
Parvaneh, an Iranian immigrant, moves into the neighborhood with her husband Patrick and their children and immediately restores life and laughter to its residents. She sees through Ove’s rough exterior, and her daughters quickly fall in love with their new “granddad” (or Abuelo). Parvaneh is the force behind Ove’s reintegration, compelling him to help Anita and Rune, take in the stray cat fond of Ove’s home, and interact with Jimmy and the other young men of the row house street. Because of her, Ove becomes a handy-man, helping the “fools” in almost every house within a four-street radius. On one occasion Ove mumbles to his wife, “Sometimes it can be quite nice having something to get on with in the daytime.”
“The neighbors are saying he’s been “like a different person” these last days, that they’ve never seen him so “engaged” before."
All this teeming life is born from Parvaneh’s insistence that Ove return from his exile. She becomes like a daughter to the old Swede. Were it not for her, Ove’s gift would be lost to the world. Instead, Ove flourishes in his old age, and his neighbors benefit from his presence thanks to Parvaneh’s call.
The Dignity of Work
Ove frequently bemoans the new world of modern society. He hates credit cards, thinks the idea of retirement is flawed and unjust, and is shocked by the general lack of loyalty toward Saab, the only car manufacturer Ove trusts. “Nowadays people change their stuff so often that any expertise in how to make things last was becoming superfluous,” thought Ove. The lost of that expertise meant that Ove was viewed as a relic.
In an astounding display of blindness and injustice, Ove’s employer forcibly retired him. “This was a world where one became outdated before one’s time was up,” thought Ove. Many of his critiques of the world proved to be wisdom in the end. When Parvaneh successfully brought Ove back into community, she also revealed the importance of his skill for others. Beyond his technical and architectural skills, Ove helps young Adrian with his romantic woes and provides leadership for the community. The dignity of work and tradition are made clear through Ove’s story.
Resist. Together.
Ove and his wife, Sonja, were the first to move into their community. “Their understanding was that children should live in row housing developments among other children. And less than forty years later there was no forest around the house anymore. Just other houses.” The quiet backwater home became a city district, and they had drug dealers, young couples, and immigrants as neighbors. Ove lived to see the under-developed neighborhood come to age and grow old, gentrifying as a “parade of uppity real estate agents … patrolled the little road between houses … like vultures watching aging water buffalo.”
Gentrification done wrongly is a destructive force, and its effects are observed in Ove with accuracy. In a study of the Italian West End of Boston, Marc Fried observed severe grief in residents who experienced the loss of their homes.[1] It is not simply the loss of a habitation, but the memories that are grieved. Old buildings become monumental works of art. Ove experiences such lost. However, when Rune and Anita are facing the similar threat, Ove gathers the community in their support. The book reveals the remarkable power of a community that works together against systems of injustice.
One of the most riveting lines in the book is said by Sonja’s new principle and boss. When offering her the job at the local school, he says, ““There’s no hope for these boys and girls,” the headmaster soberly explained in the interview. “This is not education, this is storage.” Sonja, a hero in her own right, resists this notion and teaches her young pupils to read Shakespeare. Education, gentrification, homophobia, and generational bias are all confronted by Ove and his community. They do it together, and they overcome.
Life is a Curious thing
A Man Called Ove is a story about a hero resisting the systems of social change that empower wicked men to exclude the elderly, the weak, and the disabled. These white-shirted villains are city councilmen who believe they have the power to evaluate people and decide when they are only good enough to die. Our vision for the world can and should be shaped by Parvaneh’s reminder that the elderly are needed just as much by their communities as they are dependent on them to flourish. Ove himself reveals the dignity of work done well and the vitality of a world that enables the work of its elders. The entire community illuminates the tangibility of social injustice, and they encourage the reader to resist by pursuing another way of flourishing, one that commits to the well-being of those Abuelos and Abuelas that are often forgotten.
Footnote
[1] Emily Badger, “Why Trump’s Use of the Words ‘Urban Renewal’ Is Scary for Cities,” The New York Times, December 7, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/upshot/why-trumps-use-of-the-words-urban-renewal-is-scary-for-cities.html.