A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman

It’s been six months since she died. But Ove still inspects the whole house twice a day to feel the radiators and check that she hasn’t sneakily turned up the heating.

He was a man of black and white. And 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.

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.

‘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.

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

And then one morning he saw her. She had brown hair and blue eyes and red shoes and a big yellow clasp in her hair. And then there was no more peace and quiet for Ove.

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

‘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,’

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.

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.

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.

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.