A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman

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

with that billowing cloud around her,

As if she took away with her the few words he’d possessed.

He was never able to properly explain what happened to him that day. But he stopped being happy. He wasn’t happy for several years after that.

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

You miss the strangest things when you lose someone. Little things. Smiles. The way she turned round in her sleep. Even repainting a room for her.

like a large dog watching two mice interfering with its sleep.

They remind him of two malfunctioning radiators, making high-pitched whines at each other.

Of all the imaginable things he most misses about her, the thing he really wishes he could do again is hold her hand in his. She had a way of folding her index finger into his palm, hiding it inside. And he always felt that nothing in the world was impossible when she did that. Of all the things he could miss, that’s what he misses most.

But to him, destiny was ‘someone’.

To lose your family long before you’ve had time to create your own to replace it. It’s a very specific sort of loneliness.

But his back was straighter as he walked off.

liked always knowing what to expect. Since

‘Men are what they are because of what they do. Not what they say,’ said Ove.

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.

But for Ove it was someone.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. You work and pay off the mortgage and pay tax and do what you should. You marry. For better or for worse until death do us part, wasn’t that what they agreed? Ove remembers quite clearly that it was. And she wasn’t supposed to be the first one to die. Wasn’t it bloody well understood that it was his death they were talking about? Well, wasn’t it?

‘You only need one ray of light to chase all the shadows away,’ she said to him once, when he asked her why she had to be so upbeat the whole time.

A time like that comes for all men, when they choose what sort of men they want to be. And if you don’t know the story you don’t know the men.

And, he decided, the last time he’d let anyone trick him.

And Ove realised that he wanted to hear her talking about the things she loved for the rest of his life.

She liked talking and Ove liked keeping quiet. Retrospectively, Ove assumed that was what people meant when they said that people were compatible. Many years later she told

Even men at train station ticket desks have been in love.

making the rest of the world look as if it was made in greyscale.

And then it was that way.

But if anyone had asked, he would have told them that he never lived before he met her. And not after, either.

That God and the universe and all the other things would not be allowed to win. That the swine could go to hell. So she stopped nagging.

Men like Ove and Rune were from a generation in which one was what one did, not what one talked about.

‘Loving someone is like moving into a house,’ Sonja used to say. ‘At first you fall in love with all the new things, amazed every morning that all this belongs to you, as if fearing that someone would suddenly come rushing in through the door to explain that a terrible mistake had been made, you weren’t actually supposed to live in a wonderful place like this. Then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of all its perfection, but rather its imperfections. You get to know all the nooks and crannies. How to avoid getting the key caught in the lock when it’s cold outside. Which of the floorboards flex slightly when one steps

on them or exactly how to open the wardrobe doors without their creaking. These are the little secrets that make it your home.’ Ove, of course, suspected that he represented the wardrobe

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.

One of the most painful moments in a person’s life probably comes with the insight that an age has been reached when there is more to look

back on than ahead.

‘They can call me whatever they like. No need for you to stick your bloody nose in.’