A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman

Either they walk fast or they run slowly, that’s what joggers do. It’s a forty-year-old man’s way of telling the world that he can’t do anything right.

People don’t have useful things anymore. People just have shit.

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

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

A time like that comes for every man, when he chooses what sort of man he wants to be. And if you don’t know the story, you don’t know the man.

She talked as if she were continuously on the verge of breaking into giggles. And when she giggled she sounded the way Ove imagined champagne bubbles would have sounded if they were capable of laughter.

Considering how they are constantly preventing him from dying, these neighbors of his are certainly not shy when it comes to driving a man to the brink of madness and suicide.

Ove looks at the group assembled around him, as if he’s been kidnapped and taken to a parallel universe. For a moment he thinks about swerving off the road, until he realizes that the worst-case scenario would be that they all accompanied him into the afterlife.

“You’re the funniest thing she knows. That’s why she always draws you in color,”

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.