A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman

People didn’t know how to do that any more, brew some proper coffee. In the same way as nowadays nobody could write with a pen. Because now it was all computers and espresso machines. And where was the world going if people couldn’t even write or brew a bit of coffee?

Ove is the sort of man who checks the status of all things by giving them a good kick.

And that was because Ove did not trust the Internet. He spelled it with a capital ‘I’ and accentuated the ‘-net’ even though his wife nagged that you had to put the emphasis on ‘inter’.

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.

Of all the imaginable things he most misses about her, the thing he really wishes he could do again is hold her hand in his.

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

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

She often said that ‘all roads lead to something you were always predestined to do’ . And for her, perhaps, it was something. But for Ove it was someone.

This was a world where one became outdated before one’s time was up. An entire country standing up and applauding the fact that no one was capable of doing anything properly any more. The unreserved celebration of mediocrity.

‘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.

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 there was one thing that made people forget to dislike one, it was when they were given the opportunity to talk about themselves.

‘You have to love me twice as much now,’ she said. And then Ove lied to her for the second – and last – time: he said that he would. Even though he knew it wasn’t possible for him to love her any more than he already did.

It was the happiest week of Ove’s life. It was destined to be followed by the very unhappiest.

If a non-throat-tattooed man of Ove’s age without any hesitation steps up to a throat-tattooed man of the age of this Throat Tattoo and presses him up against a car in this manner, then it’s very likely not the throat-tattooed man one should be most worried about annoying.

But when a conflict has been going on for long enough it can be impossible to sort out, for the simple reason that no one can remember how it first started.

So there were certainly people who thought that feelings could not be judged by looking at cars. But they were wrong.

‘You! You want to buy a French car. Don’t worry so much about others, you have enough problems of your own.’

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’.

The silent approach has always been her preferred trick when there are disputes with him. Whether she’s alive or dead.

first people to break the laws of bureaucracy are always the bureaucrats themselves.’

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

‘His heart is too big,’ the doctor states crassly.