Is it just me, or does A Man Called Ove remind you of Pixar’s Up?
I finally got around to reading A Man Called Ove this week, and lapped it up like the sucker I am for feel-good fiction and sappy rom-coms. In the swirling tempest of last week’s work, Fredrik Backman’s simple yet moving tale of love and loss lit a small candle in my heart. Perhaps my favourite line from the book was what cranky, reticent Ove mumbled to his radiant wife-to-be, on their first proper date:
“I just wanted to know what it felt like to be someone you look at.”
Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove
Call me a hopeless romantic, but I felt at that moment like a freshly baked chocolate lava cake, melting with saccharine sweetness as I was on the inside. And yes, that’s a really weird simile. But I do love a good chocolate lava cake.
Isn’t that what we all want, really? To feel truly seen and truly heard, in a world where my iPhone comes with built-in photo filters named things like “Vivid” and “Dramatic”, as if we could make these exciting adjectives apply to our dull, drama-free lives at the press of a button? Or maybe — surely — I am just projecting my own insecurities. After all, there are plenty of people out there who are already Oves, sticking firmly to their guns and principles, living free and unfiltered, others’ opinions be damned.
I hold respect for these individuals, in the same way that I nurse a soft spot for people who are incredibly passionate about the quirkiest topics — people who learn and seek out knowledge not because it is Ultimately Useful and will give them a better grade or job or chance of survival in a zombie apocalypse, but because they’ve fallen in love with this one obscure corner of the world they inhabit and want to immerse themselves as much as they can in its weird beauty. I suppose that’s why I get such a kick out of watching James Hoffmann deep-fry coffee beans, or reading about how Dandelion Chocolate still wraps their glossy bars of tempered chocolate in gold foil by hand.
I was actually rather blue this last week, partly because of some unpleasant reminders of the past and partly because of more farewells at the office. I’ve always been terrible at saying goodbye, whether it’s to people or places or TV series that get abruptly cancelled after a cliffhanger season finale, leaving viewers with absolutely no closure (those fiends!). My parents like to repeat this story of how I returned from my very first trip to Japan and looked glum for a month (though I’d attribute this melancholy more to the fact that my friend got lost in Tokyo Disneyland in the era when twelve-year-olds did not have cellphones, so we ended up spending the day looking for her instead of doing actual Disneyland stuff). Reading A Man Called Ove, though, I was reminded that although the timing and circumstances of such farewells are often out of our control, what we do after parting ways is for us to decide. The next page in our story should never be constrained by the previous chapters of our lives; it is a future of untold possibilities for us to imagine and dream of and write. (:
