A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman

Lanky One says with a nod.

than stopping all the time. And, as Ove’s wife often says: “If there’s

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

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.

Maybe to her destiny was “something”; that was none of his business. But to him, destiny was “someone.”

She often said that “all roads lead to something you were always predestined to do.” And for her, perhaps, it was something. But for Ove it was someone.

He never understood why she chose him. She loved only abstract things like music and books and strange words. Ove was a man entirely filled with tangible things. He liked screwdrivers and oil filters. He went through life with his hands firmly shoved into his pockets. She danced.

And Ove realized that he wanted to hear her talking about the things she loved for the rest of his life.

Ove had never been asked how he lived before he met her. But if anyone had asked him, he would have answered that he didn’t.

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

But none of them had looked at her the way that boy looked at her when he sat down beside her on the train. As if she were the only girl in the world.

He knew better than to speak ill of what she loved; after all he understood very keenly how it was to receive her love when no one else could understand why he was worthy of it.

“You have to love me twice as much now,” she said. And then Ove lied to her for the second—and last—time: he said that he would. Even though he knew it wasn’t possible for him to love her any more than he already did.

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.

He misses her so much that sometimes he can’t bear existing in his own body.

But it’s actually wrong, all this. She married him. And now he doesn’t quite know how to carry on without the tip of her nose in the pit between his throat and his shoulder. That’s all.

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.

It was as if he didn’t want other people to talk to him, he was afraid that their chattering voices would drown out the memory of her voice.

when everything that was evil seemed to assail the only person he’d ever met who didn’t deserve it.

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.