A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman

Perhaps it was the way he’d been raised. Maybe men of his generation had never been sufficiently prepared for a world where everyone spoke about doing things even though it no longer seemed worth doing them. Nowadays people stood outside their newly refurbished houses and boasted as if they’d built them with their own bare hands, even though they hadn’t so much as lifted a screwdriver. And they weren’t even trying to pretend that it was any other way. They boasted about it!

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.

‘They say the best men are born out of their faults and that they often improve later on, more than if they’d never done anything wrong,’

feel so much loss, Ove. Loss, as if my heart was beating outside my body.’ They stood in silence for a long time, with their arms around each other. And at long last she lifted her face towards his, and looked into his eyes with great seriousness. ‘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.

It’s not that he’s the sort of man who gives up and dies; he doesn’t want her to think that. 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.

All they ever talked about was how they wanted more ‘leisure time’, as if that was the only point of working: to get to the point when one didn’t have to do it.

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. Time to appeal.

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.