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.
