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.

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

Then Mum died. And Dad grew even quieter. As if she took away with her the few words he’d possessed.

‘The director says you are just like your father!’ Ove didn’t turn around. But his back was straighter as he walked off.

And that laughter of hers which, for the rest of his life, would make him feel as if someone was running around barefoot on the inside of his breast.

An entire country standing up and applauding the fact that no one was capable of doing anything properly any more. The unreserved celebration of mediocrity.

‘You only need one ray of light to chase all the shadows away,’

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.

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.

It is difficult to admit that one is wrong. Particularly when one has been wrong for a very long time.

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.

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.