A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman

Self-employed people and other idiots all drive Audis.

Of course it’s an automatic, Ove notes. Might have known. These morons would rather not have to drive their cars at all, let alone reverse into a parking space by themselves.

He would loooove self driving

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

the bills. He has no loans and no debts, so no one will have to clear up anything after him. He’s even washed up his coffee cup and canceled the newspaper subscription.

Thats y he canceled everytging.... He plans to die

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.

Finally he turns the photo of his wife in the window, so that it looks out towards the shed. He doesn’t want to make her watch what he’s about to do, but on the other hand he daren’t put the photograph facedown either.

“Ove!” Parvaneh roars at him at once, as if she’s a reprimanding schoolmistress. Ove glares at her. She glares back. “Stop being rude,” she orders. “I told you, I’m not rude!”

I loveher!!!

threw the door open and put his finger over his mouth, hushing her, as if in the next moment he was going to point out that this was actually a library.

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.

Everything else on the paper is drawn in black, but the figure in the middle is a veritable explosion of color. A riot of yellow and red and blue and green and orange and purple. “You’re the funniest thing she knows. That’s why she always draws you in color,” says Parvaneh.

Omg!!!!!!ToT

Towards the end the doctors prescribed so many painkillers for Sonja. Their bathroom still looks like a storage facility for the Colombian mafia.

“I said if you have any more problems with those bloody radiators, you can come and ring my doorbell. The cat and me are at home.”

From bh hum bug to everyone to im always home if you need help!

do, but all people at root are time optimists. We always think there’s enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like “if.”

retrospect, Anita will tell the other neighbors that she had not seen Ove so angry since 1977, when there was talk of a merger between Saab and Volvo.

XD

few minutes later Ove snatches the plastic bag with the iPad box from the counter, mumbling something about “eightthousandtwohundredandninetyfivekronor and they don’t even throw in a keyboard!” followed by “thieves,” “bandits,” and various obscenities.

“Thanks, Granddad,” she whispers and runs into her room.

Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it’s often one of the great motivations for living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury. Some need its constant presence to even be aware of its antithesis. Others become so preoccupied with it that they go into the waiting room long before it has announced its arrival. We fear it, yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves. For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone.

When the hospital staff refused to let Parvaneh accompany Ove’s stretcher into the operating room, it took the combined efforts of Patrick, Jimmy, Anders, Adrian, Mirsad, and four nurses to hold her back, and her flying fists.

“You’re not dying on me, Ove,” she weeps. “Don’t even think about it.” Ove’s fingers move weakly; she grabs them with both hands and puts her forehead in the palm of his hand. “I think you’d better calm yourself down, woman,” Ove whispers hoarsely.

I love their friendship!!!

When Parvaneh gives him a look studded with a long line of question marks and exclamation marks, the doctor sighs again in that way young doctors with glasses and plastic slippers and a stick up their ass often do when confronted by people who do not even have the common bloody decency to attend medical school before they come to the hospital.

Duh

“His heart is too big,” the doctor states crassly. Parvaneh stares blankly at him for a very long time. And then she looks at Ove in the bed, in a very searching way. And then she looks at the doctor again as if she’s waiting for him to throw out his arms and start making jazzy movements with his fingers and crying out: “Only joking!”

Like the grinch, but like medicly

Parvaneh gives him a dismissive wave. “Oh, don’t concern yourself about that. Ove is quite clearly UTTERLY LOUSY at dying!” Ove looks quite offended by that.

There are clear instructions in the letters about the funeral, which mustn’t under any circumstances “be made a bloody fuss of.” Ove doesn’t want any ceremony, he only wants to be thrown in the ground next to Sonja and that’s all. “No people. No messing about!” he states firmly and clearly to Parvaneh. More than three hundred people come to the funeral.