Last year, it published his novel “My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry,” about a girl named Elsa whose grandmother dies, leaving her with a batch of letters to deliver to people her grandmother had wronged in life.
“I write pretty fast, because I’m high strung,” Mr. As it turned out, he’d already written several more. Backman if he was working on any other novels. Backman’s quirky misanthrope, Atria asked Mr. Once it became clear that there was an appetite for Mr. He strikes up a friendship with an Iranian immigrant and her two young daughters, who find Ove’s grumpiness endearing. But he keeps getting interrupted by his clueless, prying neighbors. Six months after his wife’s death, he’s planning to commit suicide and has turned off his radiators, canceled his newspaper subscription and anchored a hook into the ceiling to hang himself. The novel’s protagonist, Ove, is a lonely curmudgeon who screams at his neighbors for parking in the wrong place and punches a hospital clown whose magic tricks annoy him. “There are 10 of us, and this was one of the rare occasions where we all agreed.” “I passed it around to the rest of the staff and said, I think this is absolutely wonderful, am I crazy?” said Nancy Usiak, a bookseller at the shop. The Book Bin in Northbrook, Ill., has sold around 1,000 copies, largely based on word-of-mouth recommendations. The novel got a boost from independent booksellers, who placed big orders and pressed it on customers. Atria was cautious at first and printed 6,600 hardcover copies, a decent run for a debut novel in translation.
Backman didn’t fit into any obvious genre mold, and there was no guarantee that his whimsical, oddball sense of humor would appeal to Americans. “It wasn’t Scandinavian noir it was Scandinavian” - he paused, searching for the right description - “something else.” “It had a great voice, and it was different from everything else I was reading,” he said. Peter Borland, who acquired United States rights to “Ove” for Atria, said he was struck by the book’s pathos and humor. Demand has been so unrelenting that Atria Books has reprinted the novel 40 times and now has more than a million copies in print. It landed on the best-seller list 18 months after it was first published and has remained there for 42 weeks. For months, it sold steadily but in modest numbers. In the United States, “Ove” got off to a slow start. “Not even the Korean publisher understands what the hell is going on.” Backman said in a recent telephone interview. Backman has gained a passionate fan base in South Korea, where the novel became a huge best-seller.
Translation rights have sold in 38 languages, including Arabic, Turkish, Latvian, Thai and Japanese. It was adapted into a successful stage production and an award-winning Swedish feature film, which recently opened in the United States. “Ove” became a blockbuster in Sweden, selling more than 840,000 copies.
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