ineke.co.uk

Ove is the sort of grumpy old person I dream of being! He lives in a fairly quiet neighbourhood where no cars are allowed in the residential area, one of many rules he is very keen to enforce – without rules there would be chaos everywhere.

He is a man of routine: every morning he does an inspection of the neighbourhood to check that nothing is amiss. He checks all areas including the bike shed, the bin store, and the parking area:

“He detoured through the guest parking area, where cars could only be left for up to twenty-four hours. Carefully he noted down all the registration numbers in the little pad he kept in his jacket pocket, and then compared these to the registrations he had noted down the day before. On occasions when the same registration numbers turned up in Ove’s notepad, Ove would go home and call the Vehicle Licensing Authority to retrieve the vehicle owner’s details, after which he’d call up the latter and inform him that he was a useless imbecile who couldn’t even read signs. Ove didn’t really care who was parked in the guest parking area, of course. But it was a question of principle. If it said twenty-four hours on the sign, that’s how long you were allowed to stay. What would it be like if everyone just parked wherever they liked? It would be chaos. There’d be cars everywhere.”

As we start the book, some new neighbours are moving in next door, and a stray cat is spending too much time around the area, neither scenario is something Ove is keen on.

Much more and I’ll be starting to spoil the premise, but hopefully this gives you a feel for him as a character, which for me was what made me keep picking up the book!

The only downside was a very stupid front cover which had the book name, and then above it the film poster where the titular character’s name has been changed for an American setting.