I recently went with Sarah to see the latest Tom Hanks movie, A Man Called Otto. All I knew was the little I could glean from the trailer and that people were upset because they had changed the titular character’s name from Ove to Otto. Well, and that it stars Tom Hanks, which is good enough for me. I expected to laugh, which I did, out loud and often. What I didn’t expect was to be so deeply moved. It was a beautiful, tender movie about a curmudgeon who comes to grips with loss and learns it’s okay to allow yourself to love and be loved. I think part of what appealed to me was how I feel myself fighting off, unsuccessfully, I fear, the cantankerous tendencies I inherited from my late father. 

As a reader, I try to read the source material for a movie before watching it. But I didn’t know where to get my hands on a copy of the book—turns out Sarah had a copy all along—and I really wanted to see the film, so I took my lovely wife on a date and we saw it together. I obviously loved it. As we discussed it on the way home, Sarah mentioned she had the book but hadn’t read it yet. So, I immediately borrowed it from her, and quickly learned why they changed his name. Ove (pronounce ooh-vuh) is a Swedish name, which makes sense, considering the story takes place there. The movie resets the story to the States, where no one even knows how to pronounce the original name, so changing it to Otto fits him well.  Like the movie, the beginning was a bit hard to take. Ove was positively insufferable. It was hard to imagine anyone having any sympathy for him at all. In the movie, he’s won over by his new neighbors in what, in retrospect, seems like a real hurry. The book does a much more thorough job of making the reader see the depth of Ove’s hurt and the difficulty he has overcoming it. It’s such a beautiful story. As much as I loved the movie, the book is even better.

One minor, though significant, way in which the book is better is at the end. It’s not that the movie did it poorly, but the book’s treatment of this poignant event is just so perfect, it makes me wonder why the producers of the film felt the need to change it. 

This book is beautiful and bittersweet and a joy to read. It may be cliché, but I laughed out loud and cried often. Just fight through the first thirty pages or so. It gets so much better. And, like life, the good stuff means a lot more in light of the bad stuff. Read this book. And see the movie. I honestly don’t think it matters which one you do first. I’m well past being one of those the-book-was-better people. They are completely different art forms and each is well worth your time. 

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