A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman

It’s been six months since she died. But Ove still inspects the whole house twice a day to feel the radiators and check that she hasn’t sneakily turned up the heating.

People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.

“It’s probably full of disgusting diseases and rabies and all sorts of things!” Ove looks at the cat. Looks at the Weed. Nods. “And so are you, most likely. But we don’t throw stones at you because of it.”

You miss the strangest things when you lose someone. Little things. Smiles. The way she turned over in her sleep. Even repainting a room for her.

“Men are what they are because of what they do. Not what they say,” said Ove.

But if anyone had asked, he would have told them that he never lived before he met her. And not after either.

He doesn’t understand where this woman keeps appearing from all the time. Can’t a man calmly and quietly stand over a cat-shaped hole in a snowdrift in his own garden anymore?

Every human being needs to know what she’s fighting for. That was what they said. And she fought for what was good. For the children she never had. And Ove fought for her. Because that was the only thing in this world he really knew.

Maybe their sorrow over children that never came should have brought the two men closer. But sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don’t share it there’s a good chance that it will drive them apart instead.

“God took a child from me, darling Ove. But he gave me a thousand others.”

Men who only required a few simple things from life, she said. A roof over their heads, a quiet street, the right make of car, and a woman to be faithful to. A job where you had a proper function. A house where things broke at regular intervals, so you always had something to tinker with.

But we are always optimists when it comes to time; we think there will be time to do things with other people. And time to say things to them.

“Loving someone is like moving into a house,” Sonja used to say. “At first you fall in love with all the new things, amazed every morning that all this belongs to you, as if fearing that someone would suddenly come rushing in through the door to explain that a terrible mistake had been made, you weren’t actually supposed to live in a wonderful place like this. Then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of all its perfection, but rather for its imperfections.

the three-year-old had demanded that Ove read her a bedtime story. Ove found it very difficult to reason with the little troll, because she didn’t seem to understand normal argumentation, so he followed her with dissatisfaction through the front hall towards her room and sat on her bedside, reading to her with his usual “Ove-excitement,” as Parvaneh once described it, although Ove didn’t know what the hell she meant by that. When the three-year-old fell asleep with her head partly on his arm and partly on the open book, Ove had put both her and the cat in the bed and turned out the light.

It is difficult to admit that one is wrong. Particularly when one has been wrong for a very long time.

The last thing Ove has time to think before everything goes dark is that he has to make her promise that she won’t let the ambulance drive down between the houses. Because vehicular traffic is prohibited in the residential area.

For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone.