A Man Called Ove

by Fredrik Backman

if you could just go and buy everything, what was the value of it? What was the value of a man?

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.’

It’s a strange thing, becoming an orphan at sixteen. 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.

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.

Will she like him as much now that he’s just an old person with no purpose in the world?

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

Even men at train station ticket desks have been in love.

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.

In their almost four decades together Sonja taught hundreds of pupils with learning difficulties to read and write, and she got them to read Shakespeare’s collected works. In the same period she never managed to make Ove read a single Shakespeare play.

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.

Sorrow does strange things to living creatures.

‘You’re the funniest thing she knows. That’s why she always draws you in colour,’

Afterwards it was only memories for Ove, and a lack of them for Rune.

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.

Sometimes it is difficult to explain why some men suddenly do the things they do. Sometimes, of course, it’s because they know they’ll do them sooner or later anyway, and so they may as well just do them now. And sometimes it’s the pure opposite – because they realise they should have done them long ago.

‘What sort of love is it if you hand someone over when it gets difficult?’

‘Abandon someone when there’s resistance? Tell me what sort of love that is!’