A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman

On this street no one took the trouble to get up any earlier than they had to. Nowadays, it was just self-employed people and other disreputable sorts living here.

He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had.

It has those new, wave-shaped headlights, Ove notes, presumably designed so that no one at night will be able to avoid the insight that here comes a car driven by an utter shit.

And if there was one single thing Ove and Rune agreed on, irrespective of how much they were feuding at the time, it was that whoever currently populated the neighbor’s house tended to be utter imbeciles.

Something inside a man goes to pieces when he has to bury the only person who ever understood him. There is no time to heal that sort of wound.

And it wasn’t as if Ove also died when Sonja left him. He just stopped living. Grief is a strange thing.