A Man Called Ove

this book is a european man's idea of whimsy. what i mean by that is that there is an underlying layer of bigotry across everything, thin enough to ignore for the first few instances but physically grating when being subject to it for 300+ pages (or 9 hours in my case). like a swedish coworker who's friendly and has interesting stories to tell, but who eventually says something that's misogynistic or racist and makes you remember ah yes, this is a white man who has never had to think about being anything else but a white man.

i could go on and on about the things i didn't like about this book but here are some of the most egregious:
1. for some reason the author can't go 2 sentences without describing how overweight a certain character is whenever he's in a scene. Like long gratuitous descriptions of how his“rolls of fat” wobbled every time he talked or moved.
2. in the audiobook, the narrator gives a half-white, half-Iranian child a thick middle eastern accent, even though he is born and raised in sweden. i can't find any reason for this choice other than to otherize non-whiteness. this coupled with the mom of the child always being called the “foreign woman” is like microaggression central.
3. all the women in this book are like perfect manic pixie dream girls who are insanely nice to ove for some reason. especially sonja. what do you mean she married him because no one else would ride the train for so long to be with her?? what do you mean she read shakespeare to special needs kids?? can you be more on the nose please
4. there's a part in which ove and his friend plant drugs in the house of rowdy teenagers and get them arrested and evicted from their neighborhood. it's meant to be like a funny bonding moment for the two men. what?! first of all, these kids' lives are now ruined. second of all, fuck your HOA. third, ACAB!!! i realized at this point that none of these issues are ones that affluent white european men ever have to think about. and then i got mad. and then i still had 2 hours left in my audiobook!!

i don't have an issue with ove being a character of questionable values and opinions. i wouldn't be so one-dimensional to expect that a protagonist's morals align with my own. my issue is with the author. i don't know what i was looking for when i started this book, but i finished it being more exhausted of white male perspectives than I had been in the recent past.
(and it also further proved my point that goodreads ratings can't be trusted.)