Cannonball Read 12

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Delightful stubbornness

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

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A Man Called Ove is about a delightfully stubborn widower in Sweden. He has a strict logic that he applies to the world. He yearns for consistency and routine. Anyone who deviates from the order is likely inefficient and an idiot in his mind. He is suspicious of most things and prefers to abstain from all social things. I enjoyed his rising frustration at the computer store when he attempts to buy a computer. Despite his crankiness, Ove fell in love with a woman named […]

Not-very good men do not very good things

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In Ferguson’s reading guide to this novel he mentions that he was heartbroken while writing this novel and this statement both surprised me and not surprised me. It starts out as a simple tale of two friends, an incident at a river and then drifting apart. Then there’s two Americans who start a religion and it seems destined that all the tales will intertwine. They do, but not in any satisfactory way. This is not a pleasant novel. It is filled with not-very good men […]

“All his life he’d used words to distract attention from this deep inarticulacy, this unspeakable emotion which he would now have to use words to describe.”

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On a prose level, I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I enjoyed the first two, which were extremely clever and a bit raw. Here, with Patrick sober (for several years, it’s implied), he once again is one among many points of view, just as he was in the first book as a five year old, when his parents’ dinner guests held most of the narrative focus. Here the party is for some duke or other on his birthday, and the Princess Margaret is […]

“How could he think his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought . . .” #CBRBingo

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“Everything was under control. No, he mustn’t think about it, or indeed about anything, and especially not about heroin, because heroin was the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a hamster’s wheel of unanswerable questions. Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favorite cushion. […]



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