A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman

All the things Ove’s wife has bought are ‘lovely’ or ‘homely’. Everything Ove buys is useful.

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

‘Ove, only a swine thinks size and strength are the same thing. Remember that.’

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.

He felt one should not go through life as if everything was exchangeable. As if loyalty was worthless.

‘You’re dancing on the inside, Ove, when no one’s watching. And I’ll always love you for that. Whether you like it or not.’

She liked talking and Ove liked keeping quiet.

Ove had never been asked how he lived before he met her. But if anyone had asked him, he would have answered that he didn’t.

And now she stood outside the station with his flowers pressed happily to her breast, in all that red cardigan of hers, making the rest of the world look as if it was made in greyscale.

And when she looked at Ove she made him feel, for the first time, that he was the only man in the world.

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

there were really only three things she loved unconditionally in her life: books, her father and cats.

But none of them had looked at her the way that boy looked at her when he sat down beside her on the train. As if she was the only girl in the world.

And when she took hold of his lower arm, thick as her thigh, and tickled him until that sulky boy’s face opened up in a smile, it was like a plaster cast cracking round a piece of jewellery, and when this happened it was as if something started singing inside Sonja. And they only belonged to her, those moments.

And when one of her girlfriends asked why she loved him she answered that most men ran away from an inferno. But men like Ove ran into it.

he knew it wasn’t possible for him to love her any more than he already did.

Ove did his best not to like any of it. But Sonja got so worked up about it all that in the end it inevitably affected him too. She laughed so loudly when he held her that he felt it through his whole body. Not even Ove could avoid liking it.

Every human being needs to know what she’s fighting for. That was what they said. And she fought for what was good. For the children she never had. And Ove fought for her. Because that was the only thing in this world he really knew.

‘Now you listen to me,’ says Ove calmly while he carefully closes the door. ‘You’ve given birth to two children and quite soon you’ll be squeezing out a third. You’ve come here from a land far away and most likely you fled war and persecution and all sorts of other nonsense. You’ve learned a new language and got yourself an education and you’re holding together a family of obvious incompetents. And I’ll be damned if I’ve seen you afraid of a single bloody thing in this world before now.’

‘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.’