A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman

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.

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

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,’

A time comes in all men’s lives when they decide what sort of men they are going to be. Whether they are the kind that let other people tread on them, or not.

‘If you can’t depend on someone being on time, you shouldn’t trust ’em with anything more important either,’

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

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.

‘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.

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.