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Fredrik BackmanA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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On the drive to the hospital, Ove must keep the windows of the Saab rolled down despite the cold weather because of the exhaust fumes leftover from his suicide attempt. Upon their arrival at the hospital, Ove immediately gets into an altercation with a parking attendant. He refuses to pay for hospital parking out of principle.
Once inside, Parvaneh goes to see Patrick, leaving Ove to watch the children, whom he regards as “the three-year-old” and “the seven-year-old.” Ove doesn’t know what to do: “[He] turns to the girls. And in the next second he looks as if he’s about to shine a desk lamp into their eyes and interrogate them on their whereabouts at the time of the murder” (106). Eventually a hospital clown, Beppo, stops by. He asks Ove for a five-crown piece: He wants to use it for a magic trick with the girls. When he tries to return a different five-crown piece to Ove, Ove punches him.
Parvaneh returns to find her daughters excited about this chain of events—and Ove grumpily sitting under surveillance of two hospital security guards. The 7-year-old almost defends Ove, saying of the clown, “He was no good at magic anyway” (109).
By the time they get home, it seems Parvaneh has figured out that Ove was planning to kill himself (likely because of the stench of exhaust fumes and the sight of the plastic tube Ove used to funnel the fumes into the car): “Parvaneh looks at Ove, looks at the plastic tube on the floor of his garage. Looks at Ove again, a touch worried” (111). She devises tasks for Ove to do—to give him purpose and waylay his plans—asking if he can bleed the radiators at her home. Ove agrees since “[t]omorrow’s as good a day as any to kill oneself” (112).
Chapter 14 returns to the past and relays the details of how Ove meets Sonja. When he sees her on the train after finishing the night shift, he asks a conductor to lend him “a spare pair of trousers and shirt, so he doesn’t have to look like a train cleaner” (113). He sits by her and she greets him. They get along: “She liked talking and Ove liked keeping quiet” (114). She admits years later that she at the time found him “puzzling,” but he was muscular and had “kind eyes” (114).
It’s revealed that Sonja takes the train every day because she’s studying to be a teacher. Ove lies and tells her he’s doing his military service. For three months, Ove finds Sonja on the train every morning. She gets tired of him not making a move, so she does, telling him, “I’ll be waiting here tomorrow evening at eight o’clock. I want you to be wearing a suit and I’d like you to invite me out for dinner” (116).
When Ove goes to pick her up, he’s wearing his father’s old suit. After their dinner, Ove tells her the truth about his job: He’s not in the military service but a cleaner on a night train. He assumes she will never want to see him again and be angry. She responds that she knew all along military servicemen wouldn’t be going home at five in the morning: “Ove had hardly been as discreet as a Russian spy, she added” (119).
Sonja asks him what he wants to do with his life. He says he wants to build houses. Days later, she arrives at his boarding house with brochures for a distance-learning course leading to an engineering qualification. He completes the exams and gets a job at the housing office (the same job he loses in the present day). Sonja wants to get married, so he proposes. They spend a life together until Sonja dies, although the nature of her passing is yet to be clear.
Back in the present day, Ove is orchestrating yet another suicide attempt. This time he wants to jump in front of a train. As usual, things don’t go as planned. First, the card he uses to try to purchase a train ticket so that he can access the train platform doesn’t work. Then, the train he wants to jump in front of does not arrive on time. Finally, a man on the platform has a stroke or seizure and falls onto the tracks in front of the oncoming train.
Everyone else on the platform is in a panic. Ove is the first to act. He jumps onto the tracks and lifts the man out. He then stays on the tracks and faces the oncoming train. He is committed to going through with his plan—until he sees the face of the train driver: “He can’t be more than twenty years old. One of those that still gets called ‘the puppy’ by his older colleagues” (127). Ove’s construction colleagues gave him such a nickname him when he was a youth. Ove concludes that “there’s a right way of doing things. And a wrong way” (129), and this is a wrong way. He jumps out of the way just in time: “And so this day is also ruined” (129).
Back in his neighborhood, he sees a white Škoda—the same one from Chapter 11. It’s people from the Council, who are planning to take Rune away to a care home. Ove runs into Anders and Blonde Weed, who viciously informs Ove that he’ll be next. She gives him the finger as she drives away with Anders in his Audi. Ove is so angry he wants to chase after them—but then he realizes he’s out of breath and his pulse is racing. His heart is acting up.
When Ove returns home, he notices a sight he missed that morning: A snowdrift by the shed has a cat-shaped hole in it. He surmises that there is a cat at the bottom of it.
Chapter 14 dives further into the depths of Ove’s grief. Sonja was his guiding light: She guided him towards the job in engineering, and she was the one who pushed them to get married and who wanted to start a family. With her gone, he’s lost: “[I]f anyone had asked, he would have told them that he never lived before he met her. And not after, either” (120).
Ove is an inflexible person, and his inability to cope with change reflects his attitude towards innovations like credit/debit cards: “For the last twenty years practically every human being he’s met has done nothing but drone on at Ove about he should be paying for everything by card. […] Ove doesn’t trust the banks and all their electronics” (122). As usual, it was Sonja who insisted he get a card.
Ove becomes more conscious of his suicide and its link to other people in Chapter 15. If he allows a train to kill him, this will draw parallels to his father, who died in a railway accident: “There’s a certain symbolism in a train taking his life and he doesn’t like this much” (125). What’s more, a public suicide automatically demands he take others into account:
Fair enough that Ove no longer wants his life. But the sort of man who ruins someone else’s by making eye contact with him seconds before his body is turned into a bloody paste against the said person’s windscreen; damn it, Ove is not that sort of man. Neither his dad nor Sonja would ever have forgiven him for that (128).
This quote on one hand speaks yet again to how much importance Ove places on principles and his “what’s right is right” mentality. The last line of this quote additionally crystallizes the two people who seem to have been the guiding compass for Ove throughout his wife: his father and Sonja. With both these significant people gone, Ove is unsure about what to do with himself or the rest of his life.
By Fredrik Backman