A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman

The very sort of smile that makes decent folk want to slap Buddhist monks in the face,

And if you could just go and buy everything, what was the value of it? What was the value of a man?

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.

It’s an untidy, mischievous laugh that refuses to go along with rules and prescriptions.

Ove never quite fathomed what she meant by that. He’d never been one for dancing. It seemed far too haphazard and giddy. He liked straight lines and clear decisions. That was why he had always liked mathematics. There were right or wrong answers there. Not like the other hippy subjects they tried to trick you into doing at school, where you could ‘argue your case’. As if that was a way of concluding a discussion: checking who knew more long words. Ove wanted what was right to be right, and what was wrong to be wrong. He knew very

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.

Ove looks at the book more or less as if it just sent him a chain letter insisting that the book was really a Nigerian prince who had a ‘very lucrative investment opportunity’ for Ove and now only needed Ove’s account number ‘to sort something out’.

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

‘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,’ she’d

As if they were kicking a memory back and forth, a memory of a woman who insisted on seeing more potential in certain men than they saw in themselves.

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.

‘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.’

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

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.

Love is a strange thing. It takes you by surprise.