A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman

You miss the strangest things when you lose someone. Little things.

She believed in destiny. That all the roads you walk in life, in one way or another ‘lead to what has been predetermined for you’.

Maybe to her destiny was ‘something’, that was none of his business. 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.

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

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

Because a time comes in all men’s lives when they decide what sort of men they’re going to be: the kind that lets other people walk all over them, or not.

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

‘I just wanted to know what it felt like to be someone you look at.’ As

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,’

if one didn’t have anything to say one had to find something to ask. If there was one thing that made people forget to dislike one, it was when they were given the opportunity to talk about themselves.

‘Every man needs to know what he’s fighting for.’

‘All people want to live dignified lives, dignity just means something different to different people,’

We always think there’s enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like ‘if’.

‘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.

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. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury. Some need its constant presence to even be aware of its antithesis. Others become so preoccupied with it that they go into the waiting room long before it has announced its arrival. 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.

And time is a curious thing. Most of us only live for the time that lies right ahead of us. A few days, weeks, years. 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. And when time no longer lies ahead of one, other things have to be lived for. Memories, perhaps. Afternoons in the sun with someone’s hand clutched in one’s own. The fragrance of flowerbeds in fresh bloom. Sundays in a café. Grandchildren, perhaps. One finds a way of living for the sake of someone else’s future.