Fredrik Backman - A Man Called Ove
Ove checks his watch and grudgingly agrees, reminding the assistant that some people have better things to do than stand around all day waiting.
Page: 7, Location: 53-54
The colleague looks very happy, as people do when they have not been working for a sufficient stretch of time as sales assistants.
Page: 7, Location: 54-55
On this street no one took the trouble to get up any earlier than they had to. Nowadays, it was just self-employed people and other disreputable sorts living here.
Page: 9, Location: 74-76
Ove is the sort of man who checks the status of all things by giving them a good kick.
Page: 10, Location: 85-86
He walked across the parking area and strolled back and forth along all the garages to make sure none of them had been burgled in the night or set on fire by gangs of vandals. Such things had never happened around here, but then Ove had never skipped one of his inspections either.
Page: 10, Location: 86-88
Having said that, once the decision was made to sort the trash, someone had to ensure that it was actually being done. Not that anyone had asked Ove to do it, but if men like Ove didn’t take the initiative there’d be anarchy. There’d be bags of trash all over the place.
Page: 10, Location: 97-100
d’état”),
Page: 11, Location: 106-106
The steering group realized soon enough that the Internet would watch Ove throwing out his trash over Ove’s own dead body. And in the end no cameras were installed. Just as well, Ove reasoned. The daily inspection was more effective anyway. You knew who was doing what and who was keeping things under control. Anyone with half a brain could see the sense of
Page: 11, Location: 112-114
A shed-load of men with elaborate beards, changing jobs and changing wives and changing their car makes. Just like that. Whenever they feel like it.
Page: 14, Location: 144-146
Either they walk fast or they run slowly, that’s what joggers
Page: 14, Location: 148-148
Either they walk fast or they run slowly, that’s what joggers do.
Page: 14, Location: 148-148
with clown paint all over her face and sunglasses so big that one can’t tell whether they’re a pair of glasses or some kind of helmet. She
Page: 14, Location: 152-153
Every IT consultant trumpeting some data-code diagnosis and wearing one of those non-gender-specific cardigans they all have to wear these days would put up a hook any old way. But Ove’s hook is going to be as solid as a rock. He’s going to screw it in so hard that when the house is demolished it’ll be the last thing standing.
Page: 15, Location: 159-161
A few seconds later his front door seems to fly open of its own accord, as if afraid that
Page: 17, Location: 187-188
A few seconds later his front door seems to fly open of its own accord, as if afraid that Ove might otherwise walk straight through
Page: 17, Location: 187-188
Ove feels an instinctive skepticism towards all people taller than six feet; the blood can’t quite make it all the way up to the brain.
Page: 18, Location: 196-197
The husband just nods back at her with an indescribably harmonious smile. The very sort of smile that makes decent folk want to slap Buddhist monks in the face, Ove thinks to himself.
Page: 19, Location: 204-206
Ove looks at the Lanky One as if the Lanky One has just squatted over the hood of Ove’s car and left a turd on
Page: 19, Location: 207-208
“Holy Christ. A lower-arm amputee with cataracts could have backed this trailer more accurately than you,” Ove mutters as he gets into the car.
Page: 21, Location: 233-234
Ove doubts whether someone who can’t park a car properly should even be allowed to vote.
Page: 21, Location: 238-239
“You shouldn’t even be allowed to rewind a cassette,” grumbles Ove.
Page: 22, Location: 256-256
superfluous?
Page: 28, Location: 322-322
“You almost expect if you stepped through this lot you’d find yourself in Narnia,” a friend of Ove’s wife had once joked. Ove didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, but he did agree there were a hell of a lot of coats.
Page: 29, Location: 349-351
“And it’s getting worse and worse,” he liked to add, just in case by some miracle she hadn’t heard him the first time.
Page: 31, Location: 367-368
And, as Ove’s wife often says: “If there’s one thing you could write in Ove’s obituary, it’s ‘At least he was economical with gas.’”
Page: 32, Location: 387-388
If there’s one thing in this world that Ove dislikes, it’s when someone tries to trick him.
Page: 35, Location: 422-422
He looks at her for a long time. Finally he puts his hand carefully on the big boulder and caresses it tenderly from side to side, as if touching her cheek. “I miss you,” he whispers. 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.
Page: 37, Location: 456-459
every morning and voluntarily decided to share the whole day with him. He couldn’t either. He built her a bookshelf and she filled it with books by people who wrote page after page about their feelings.
Page: 39, Location: 472-473
Her friends couldn’t see why she woke up every morning and voluntarily decided to share the whole day with him. He couldn’t either. He built her a bookshelf and she filled it with books by people who wrote page after page about their feelings.
Page: 39, Location: 472-473
He was a man of black and white. And she was color. All the color he had.
Page: 39, Location: 475-476
his growing up; he had never been the sort of man who went around remembering things unless
Page: 39, Location: 478-479
Nor did he remember so very much about his growing up; he had never been the sort of man who went around remembering things unless there was a need for it. He remembered that he was quite happy and that for a few years afterwards he wasn’t—that was about it.
Page: 39, Location: 478-480
discordant
Page: 40, Location: 488-488
“Ove, only a swine thinks size and strength are the same thing. Remember that.” And Ove never forgot
Page: 40, Location: 495-495
He was well liked down at the railway, quiet but kind. There were some who said he was “too kind.” Ove remembers how as a child he could never understand how this could be something bad.
Page: 41, Location: 498-499
Then Mum died. And Dad grew even quieter. As if she took away with her the few words he’d possessed.
Page: 41, Location: 499-500
night he would never drive any car but a Saab.
Page: 43, Location: 528-528
He was eight years old and decided that night he would never drive any car but a Saab.
Page: 43, Location: 528-528
“But I knew you would hand it in, and I knew a person like Tom wouldn’t,” said Ove. His father nodded. And not another word was said about it.
Page: 46, Location: 568-569
At the same time, Ove made it clear to the vicar that there was no need to reserve a place for him in the pews at Sunday service for the foreseeable future. Not because Ove did not believe in God, he explained to the vicar, but because in his view this God seemed to be a bit of a bloody swine.
Page: 46, Location: 576-578
He worked for the railways for five years. Then one morning he boarded a train and saw her for the first time. That was the first time he’d laughed since his father’s death. And life was never again the same.
Page: 47, Location: 586-588
Not that Ove dislikes fat people. Certainly not. People can look any way they like. He has just never been able to understand them, can’t fathom how they do it. How much can one person eat? How does one manage to turn oneself into a twin-size person? It must take a certain determination, he reflects.
Page: 49, Location: 604-606
Ove noticed that they never got the containers back, adding that maybe the young man hadn’t noticed the difference between the box and the food inside it. At which point Ove’s wife would tell him that was enough. And then it was enough.
Page: 49, Location: 611-613
“And so are you, most likely. But we don’t throw stones at you because of it.”
Page: 54, Location: 673-674
The worst thing Ove knows is when someone just drills a hole in the ceiling, hit-or-miss.
Page: 58, Location: 724-725
The third time Ove stops drilling and glares at the door. As if he may be able to convince whoever is standing outside to disappear by his mental powers alone. It doesn’t work. The person in question obviously thinks the only rational explanation for his not opening the door the first time around
Page: 59, Location: 735-737
The third time Ove stops drilling and glares at the door. As if he may be able to convince whoever is standing outside to disappear by his mental powers alone. It doesn’t work. The person in question obviously thinks the only rational explanation for his not opening the door the first time around was that he did not hear the doorbell.
Page: 59, Location: 735-737
Parvaneh looks at the Lanky One and rolls her eyes, and if it hadn’t been for her belly, which testified to a willingness on her part to contribute to the survival of the Lanky One’s genetic makeup, Ove might have found her almost sympathetic at this point.
Page: 63, Location: 787-789
He adds the last part as if Ove would not otherwise be able to understand the implications of that word, “jammed.”
Page: 66, Location: 831-832
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. She had a way of folding her index finger into his palm, hiding it inside. And he always felt that nothing in the world was impossible when she did that. Of all the things he could miss, that’s what he misses most.
Page: 71, Location: 904-906
they do. Not what they say,” said Ove. The director looked at him with surprise. It was the longest sequence of words anyone at the railway depot had heard the boy say since he started working there two years ago. In all honesty, Ove did not know where they came from. He just felt they had to be said.
Page: 79, Location: 1008-1011
“Men are what they are because of what they do. Not what they say,” said Ove. The director looked at him with surprise. It was the longest sequence of words anyone at the railway depot had heard the boy say since he started working there two years ago. In all honesty, Ove did not know where they came from. He just felt they had to be said.
Page: 79, Location: 1008-1011
“The director asked me to pass on another message: You did not take that wallet when you were nine years old. And he’ll be deuced if you took anything now. And it would be a damned pity for him to be responsible for kicking a decent man’s son into the street just because the son has some principles.”
Page: 80, Location: 1022-1025
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.
Page: 80, Location: 1027-1029
Rune and Ove had known one another for almost forty years, and they had been at loggerheads for at least thirty-seven of them.
Page: 82, Location: 1038-1039
“How the heck are you supposed to have a reasonable conversation with someone who buys a BMW?”
Page: 83, Location: 1058-1058
And there was a part of him that missed that bloody old sod.
Page: 84, Location: 1075-1076
This society, thinks Ove. Can’t they even manufacture rope anymore? He swears profusely while he furiously tries to untangle his legs. How can one fail to manufacture rope, for Christ’s sake? How can you get rope wrong? No, there’s no
Page: 85, Location: 1080-1082
This society, thinks Ove. Can’t they even manufacture rope anymore? He swears profusely while he furiously tries to untangle his legs. How can one fail to manufacture rope, for Christ’s sake? How can you get rope wrong?
Page: 85, Location: 1080-1082
And if there was anything this middle class was not enamored of, it was whatever stood in the way of progress.
Page: 87, Location: 1106-1107
He watched the house from the car, as if hoping that it might start repairing itself if he waited patiently enough.
Page: 88, Location: 1114-1115
surreptitiously
Page: 91, Location: 1153-1153
consternation,
Page: 92, Location: 1169-1169
admonishments,
Page: 92, Location: 1170-1170
If cats have nine lives, this one is quite clearly working its way through at least the seventh or eighth of them.
Page: 99, Location: 1248-1249
indignantly
Page: 99, Location: 1252-1252
gesticulation
Page: 101, Location: 1275-1275
The Pregnant Foreign Woman should probably have learned by now not to stand so close to doors when Ove is on the other side.
Page: 104, Location: 1330-1331
“Who’s Patrick?” Ove asks the chin. “My husband,” the chin answers.
Page: 105, Location: 1345-1346
“Patrick fell off the ladder.” She leans her head back, so that Ove stands there talking to the underside of her chin. “Who’s Patrick?” Ove asks the chin. “My husband,” the chin answers.
Page: 105, Location: 1343-1346
But Ove knows very well that there’ll be no end of nagging from his wife if the last thing Ove does in this life is to give a pregnant woman a nosebleed and then abandon her to take the bus.
Page: 108, Location: 1381-1382
That was why he had always liked mathematics. There were right or wrong answers there. Not like the other hippie subjects they tried to trick you into doing at school, where you could “argue your case.” As if that was a way of concluding a discussion: checking who knew more long words. Ove wanted what was right to be right, and what was wrong to be wrong.
Page: 110, Location: 1396-1399
A time comes in every man’s life when he decides what sort of man he is are going to be. Whether he is the kind who lets other people tread on him, or not.
Page: 113, Location: 1444-1445
A time like that comes for every man, when he chooses what sort of man he wants to be. And if you don’t know the story, you don’t know the man.
Page: 114, Location: 1457-1458
despondent
Page: 116, Location: 1478-1478
His days passed like this, slow and methodical. And then one morning he saw her. She had brown hair and blue eyes and red shoes and a big yellow clasp in her hair. And then there was no more peace and quiet for Ove.
Page: 116, Location: 1485-1487
She waddles off towards the entrance, one hand on her pouting belly, as if concerned that the child may try to escape.
Page: 117, Location: 1492-1494
And in the next second he looks as if he’s just about to shine a desk lamp into their eyes and interrogate them on their whereabouts at the time of the murder.
Page: 120, Location: 1536-1537
So Ove turns to the girls. And in the next second he looks as if he’s just about to shine a desk lamp into their eyes and interrogate them on their whereabouts at the time of the murder.
Page: 120, Location: 1535-1537
“Once upon a time there was a little train,” reads Ove, with all the enthusiasm of someone reciting a tax statement.
Page: 121, Location: 1552-1553
“I’m not an ‘old man,’” Ove hisses. “Clauwn!” the three-year-old cries out jubilantly. “And I’m not a CLOWN either!” he roars. The older one rolls her eyes at Ove, not unlike the way her mother often rolls her eyes at Ove. “She doesn’t mean you. She means the clown.”
Page: 122, Location: 1564-1567
“CLAAUUWN,” the toddler howls, jumping up and down on the bench in a way that finally convinces Ove that the kid is on drugs.
Page: 122, Location: 1569-1570
squelches
Page: 123, Location: 1572-1572
“Ove HIT the clauwn, Mum,” the three-year-old titters as if this was the best thing that ever happened in her whole
Page: 125, Location: 1602-1603
dour
Page: 126, Location: 1630-1630
There’d be a hellish amount of nagging from Ove’s wife if he went and arrived in the next world as a newly qualified child murderer.
Page: 127, Location: 1631-1633
effervescent
Page: 128, Location: 1640-1640
She liked talking and Ove liked keeping quiet. Retrospectively, Ove assumed that was what people meant when they said that people were compatible.
Page: 129, Location: 1652-1654
Ove did the same thing every day for three months. In the end she grew tired of his never inviting her out for dinner. So she invited herself instead. “I’ll be waiting here tomorrow evening at eight o’clock. I want you to be wearing a suit and I’d like you to invite me out for dinner,” she said succinctly as she stepped off the train one Friday evening.
Page: 131, Location: 1675-1678
“If you can’t depend on someone being on time, you shouldn’t trust ’em
Page: 132, Location: 1691-1692
“If you can’t depend on someone being on time, you shouldn’t trust ’em with anything more important either,”
Page: 132, Location: 1691-1692
ribbing
Page: 132, Location: 1695-1695
And when she did finally turn up, in a long floral-print skirt and a cardigan so red that it made Ove shift his weight from his right foot to his left, he decided that maybe her inability to be on time was not the most important thing.
Page: 133, Location: 1701-1703
Whatever the case, he had eaten in advance so he could afford to let her order whatever she wanted from the menu, while opting for the cheapest dish for himself.
Page: 133, Location: 1710-1712
ingratiatingly.
Page: 134, Location: 1713-1713
“Anyway, everyone knows soldiers don’t go home at five o’clock on weekdays.” Ove had hardly been as discreet as a Russian spy, she added. She’d come to the conclusion that he had his reasons for it. And she’d liked the way he listened to her. And made her laugh. And that, she said, had been more than enough for her.
Page: 135, Location: 1726-1729
But she just whispered, “Everything will be fine, darling Ove,” and leaned her arm against his arm. And then gently pushed her index finger into the palm of his hand. And then closed her eyes and died.
Page: 136, Location: 1747-1748
But if anyone had asked, he would have told them that he never lived before he met her. And not after either.
Page: 136, Location: 1752-1753
They stand there staring at him, not at all unlike the way they were standing just now and staring into that hole. It seems to be their prime area of competence, in fact: to stare at things. Ove stares back.
Page: 144, Location: 1863-1864
The old man lived a long way north, a good way into the forest, almost as if he had consulted a map of all the population centers in the country before concluding that this was as far from other people as one could live.
Page: 151, Location: 1943-1945
have a woman. She is just not home at the moment,” he spat out the few times anyone dared bring up the question.
Page: 151, Location: 1946-1947
furtively
Page: 158, Location: 2026-2026
He hears voices from the living room. He can hardly believe his ears. Considering how they are constantly preventing him from dying, these neighbors of his are certainly not shy when it comes to driving a man to the brink of madness and suicide. That’s for sure.
Page: 158, Location: 2038-2040
assiduously
Page: 161, Location: 2071-2071
contrite.
Page: 162, Location: 2085-2086
It was actually quite difficult to determine whether he was just an unusually large cat or an outstandingly small lion.
Page: 165, Location: 2128-2128
It was actually quite difficult to determine whether he was just an unusually large cat or an outstandingly small lion. And you should never befriend something if there’s a possibility it may take a fancy to eating you in your sleep.
Page: 165, Location: 2128-2129
“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.
Page: 167, Location: 2156-2158
brusqueness,
Page: 169, Location: 2177-2177
Immediately there’s a disagreement between Ove and the cat about whether or not the cat should sit on a sheet of newspaper in the Saab’s passenger seat.
Page: 171, Location: 2200-2201
scimitar.
Page: 172, Location: 2213-2213
whippersnappers
Page: 175, Location: 2250-2250
“doolally
Page: 176, Location: 2254-2254
She also ate bananas in such quantities that the people at the supermarket must have thought Ove had started a zoo.
Page: 176, Location: 2258-2259
He had almost forgotten that feeling. The humiliation of it. The powerlessness. The realization that one cannot fight men in white shirts.
Page: 183, Location: 2353-2354
during their daily inspection, when they discovered that the sign forbidding vehicular traffic within the residential area had been run over. This inspired such colorful profanities from Ove that the cat looked quite embarrassed.
Page: 189, Location: 2418-2420
prattling
Page: 193, Location: 2476-2476
“He saved a man’s life; he’d fallen on the track!” yelled the garage door. “Are you sure you’ve got the right Ove?” said Parvaneh. Ove looked insulted.
Page: 194, Location: 2476-2478
And she wept. An ancient, inconsolable despair that screamed and tore and shredded them both as countless hours passed. Time and sorrow and fury flowed together in stark, long-drawn darkness. Ove knew there and then that he would never forgive himself for having got up from his seat at that exact moment, for not being there to protect them. And knew that this pain was forever.
Page: 200, Location: 2550-2552
It made Ove feel as if his chest was slowly rising out of the ruins of a collapsed house after an earthquake. It gave his heart space to beat again.
Page: 201, Location: 2569-2570
But everywhere, sooner or later, he was stopped by men in white shirts with strict, smug expressions on their faces. And one couldn’t fight them. Not only did they have the state on their side, they were the state. The last complaint was rejected. The fighting was over because the white shirts had decided so. And Ove never forgave them that.
Page: 202, Location: 2585-2588
parquet
Page: 203, Location: 2590-2590
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.
Page: 203, Location: 2599-2601
Ove looks at the group assembled around him, as if he’s been kidnapped and taken to a parallel universe. For a moment he thinks about swerving off the road, until he realizes that the worst-case scenario would be that they all accompanied him into the afterlife.
Page: 206, Location: 2633-2634
“Can we stop, Ove? Nasanin needs to pee,” Parvaneh calls out, in that manner peculiar to people who believe that the backseat of a Saab is two hundred yards behind the driver.
Page: 206, Location: 2636-2637
“So you have a job, then?” says Ove. Jimmy nods enthusiastically. “I program iPhone apps.” Ove has no further questions.
Page: 208, Location: 2668-2670
When she says that last bit she points at a figure in the middle of the drawing. Everything else on the paper is drawn in black, but the figure in the middle is a veritable explosion of color. A riot of yellow and red and blue and green and orange and purple. “You’re the funniest thing she knows. That’s why she always draws you in color,” says Parvaneh.
Page: 209, Location: 2681-2684
Towards the end the doctors prescribed so many painkillers for Sonja. Their bathroom still looks like a storage facility for the Colombian mafia.
Page: 211, Location: 2701-2702
Ove obviously doesn’t trust medicine, has always been convinced its only real effects are psychological and, as a result, it only works on people with feeble brains.
Page: 211, Location: 2702-2703
Ove stands there with his hands in his pockets. The cat beside him looks as if it would do the same, if it had pockets. Or hands.
Page: 215, Location: 2762-2763
Anita nods. As one does when faced with the undeniable fact that a bit of corrugated iron is the sort of thing that all normal, right-thinking people keep lying about in their sheds, just in case there’s call for
Page: 216, Location: 2777-2778
As one does when facing the indisputable fact that there’s nothing odd about a normal man without a metal roof getting through his corrugated iron at such a rate that it runs out.
Page: 217, Location: 2780-2781
indulgently.
Page: 218, Location: 2796-2796
nattering.”
Page: 218, Location: 2801-2801
furrowed
Page: 218, Location: 2806-2806
says the youth, with that new-won hope in his eyes about perhaps being able to rescue his fantasy relationship with a girlfriend who doesn’t even know that she’s his girlfriend—the sort of relationship that only a boy in late puberty with greasy hair can have. “I
Page: 224, Location: 2884-2886
sodding
Page: 225, Location: 2900-2900
Ove sighs. The cat sits in the backseat and looks as if it wished, with intensity, that cats knew how to strap on safety belts.
Page: 228, Location: 2931-2932
No one beeps. No one moves. Everyone seems to be thinking the same thing: 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.
Page: 232, Location: 2987-2989
twits
Page: 233, Location: 2998-2998
And then he utters seven words, which Parvaneh will always remember as the loveliest compliment he’ll ever give her. “Because you are not a complete twit.”
Page: 233, Location: 2999-3000
Ove suggested to Rune that he button up his shirt and go see a psychologist about his delusions of living on the French Riviera. Rune made a malicious joke at Ove’s expense, to the effect that Ove had probably only imagined seeing that rat.
Page: 236, Location: 3032-3033
noughties
Page: 239, Location: 3078-3078
Ove did not know himself how their animosity had begun, though he knew very well that it ended there and then. Afterwards it was only memories for Ove, and a lack of them for Rune.
Page: 240, Location: 3083-3085
Maybe their sorrow over children that never came should have brought the two men closer. But sorrow is unreliable in that way. When people don’t share it there’s a good chance that it will drive them apart instead.
Page: 240, Location: 3092-3094
tears. And that was the moment when Ove realized that a part of Rune had given up forever. And for that maybe neither Ove nor Rune forgave him.
Page: 241, Location: 3099-3100
So there were certainly people who thought that feelings could not be judged by looking at cars. But they were wrong.
Page: 241, Location: 3100-3101
Because Ove, as Parvaneh had soon realized, was the sort of man who, when he was not quite certain where he was going, just carried on walking straight ahead, convinced that the road would eventually fall into line.
Page: 243, Location: 3111-3113
“You know, Ove, sometimes one almost suspects you have a heart. . .
Page: 246, Location: 3156-3157
nonplussed.
Page: 249, Location: 3201-3202
“Why the hell would I say anything?” Ove points at him with exasperation. “You! You want to buy a French car. Don’t worry so much about others, you have enough problems of your own.”
Page: 251, Location: 3241-3243
On Sundays they went to a café and drank coffee. Ove read the newspaper and Sonja talked. And then it was Monday. And one Monday she was no longer there.
Page: 254, Location: 3270-3272
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.
Page: 254, Location: 3274-3275
That’s what Ove misses most of all. Having things the same as usual.
Page: 255, Location: 3285-3285
He had no intention of placing his foot in an American car, unless his foot and the rest of his body had first been placed in a coffin, they should be bloody clear about that.
Page: 255, Location: 3289-3291
assail
Page: 256, Location: 3298-3298
Ove got angry instead. Maybe because he felt someone had to be angry on her behalf, when everything that was evil seemed to assail the only person he’d ever met who didn’t deserve it.
Page: 256, Location: 3297-3298
Almost everyone did call. They came to visit in long lines. One weekend there were so many of them in the row house that Ove had to go outside and sit in his toolshed for six hours.
Page: 257, Location: 3308-3309
“God took a child from me, darling Ove. But he gave me a thousand others.” In the fourth year she died.
Page: 257, Location: 3312-3314
One of the few traits of the cat that Ove was highly appreciative of was its reluctance to crap in other people’s homes. Ove was a man of the same ilk.
Page: 260, Location: 3348-3349
But then of course Parvaneh came banging on his door as if it were the last functioning toilet in the civilized world. As if that woman had nowhere to wee at home.
Page: 261, Location: 3349-3350
And this was the reason why Ove did not die today. Because he was detained by something that made him sufficiently angry to hold his attention.
Page: 264, Location: 3395-3396
And Ove can’t cope with it anymore. He feels it in that moment more clearly than ever. He can’t fight anymore. Doesn’t want to fight anymore. Just wants it all to stop.
Page: 267, Location: 3436-3438
Sonja said once that to understand men like Ove and Rune, one had to understand from the very beginning that they were men caught in the wrong time. Men who only required a few simple things from life, she said. A roof over their heads, a quiet street, the right make of car, and a woman to be faithful to. A job where you had a proper function. A house where things broke at regular intervals, so you always had something to tinker with.
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Not that he needs music to take his own life, and not that he likes the idea of the radio clicking its way through units of electricity when he’s gone. But because if the cat wakes up from the bang, it may end up thinking that it’s just a part of one of those modern pop songs the radio plays all the time these days. And then go back to sleep. That is Ove’s train of thought.
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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.”
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And this is why a cat, an overweight allergy sufferer, a bent person, and a man called Ove make the inspection round that morning.
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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.
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In retrospect, Anita will tell the other neighbors that she had not seen Ove so angry since 1977, when there was talk of a merger between Saab and Volvo.
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And so it was that the young woman stayed on in the house with her son, a chubby, computer-loving little boy whose name was Jimmy.
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But as Ove irritably explains to them, that’s only because Ove has never bloody engaged himself in their particular business before. He’s always been a bloody “engaged” person.
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“The great thing about scrutinizing bureaucracy when you’re a journalist, you see, is that the first people to break the laws of bureaucracy are always the bureaucrats themselves.”
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And if Anita hadn’t known better, she could have sworn that in the minutes that followed she heard Rune laughing out loud several times.
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“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 for 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 them creaking. These are the little secrets that make it your home.”
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Ove looks at her with boundless disappointment, as if she really hasn’t listened to anything he’s said.
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“Right,” says Parvaneh, rolling her eyes in a way that makes Ove suspect she is not accepting his authority on the topic as one might reasonably expect her to.
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palaver
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Ove liked people who didn’t do what Patrick told them to do.
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Ove nodded. Maybe they weren’t totally worthless after all, those two kids.
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titter
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Not that Ove dares bring up the giant tortoise metaphor, of course. There are more pleasant ways of killing oneself, he feels. And that’s speaking as someone who’s already tried quite a few of them.
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multifarious
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“Never you bloody mind!” to him with the sort of smile that makes Ove want to throw things at her. Nothing hard, perhaps. But something symbolic.
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A Toyota. Hardly an optimal choice of car for any kind of thinking person, Ove had pointed out to him many times while they stood there at the dealership.
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When Ove got to the dealership the bloody kid had been checking out a Hyundai. So it could have been worse.
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Ove reads through it as if it were a legal transfer of rights for a leasehold agreement.
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Ove nods conspiratorially, like a criminal who has just made a sign to another criminal that the telephone they are using is wiretapped.
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And not until Ove roars, “Have you been frontally lobotomized or what?!” to the young man who’s trying to show him the shop’s range of portable computers does Jimmy come hurrying to his aid. And
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intransigent
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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.
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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
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One finds a way of living for the sake of someone else’s future. And it wasn’t as if Ove also died when Sonja left him. He just stopped living. Grief is a strange thing.
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“You’re listed here as the ‘next of kin,’” he says, glancing briefly at this emphatically Iranian thirty-year-old woman on the chair, and this emphatically un-Iranian Swede in the bed.
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sniggering,
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anodyne
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he begins in an anodyne voice, following this up with a series of terms that no human being with less than ten years of medical training or an entirely unhealthy addiction to certain television series could ever be expected to understand.
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When Parvaneh gives him a look studded with a long line of question marks and exclamation marks, the doctor sighs again in that way young doctors with glasses and plastic slippers and a stick up their ass often do when confronted by people who do not even have the common bloody decency to attend medical school before they come to the hospital.
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“Ove’s heart is too big; I think I’m going to die.” “It’s me who’s bloody dying!” Ove objects.
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“Oh, don’t concern yourself about that. Ove is quite clearly UTTERLY LOUSY at dying!”
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“Oh, don’t concern yourself about that. Ove is quite clearly UTTERLY LOUSY at dying!” Ove looks quite offended by that.
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He’s supported on one side by Parvaneh and on the other by Patrick. One is on crutches and the other knocked up; that’s the support you get, he thinks. But he doesn’t say it;
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The one that says “To Granddad” gets the top spot. She tries not to smile. Doesn’t succeed very convincingly.
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On the other hand, he names a sandwich after Jimmy, and Jimmy himself says it’s the most magnificent present he’s ever had.
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He continues living in his mother’s house with Mirsad. The following year they adopt a little girl. Jimmy brings her along to Anita and Rune’s every afternoon, without fail, at three o’clock when they have coffee.
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She teaches him to insert smileys into a text message, and he makes her promise never to tell Patrick that he’s got himself a cell phone.
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Ove builds a splash pond for him in his outside space but when someone calls it a splash pond Ove snorts that “Actually it’s a bloody pool, isn’t it!”
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Ove doesn’t want any ceremony, he only wants to be thrown in the ground next to Sonja and that’s all. “No people. No messing about!” he states firmly and clearly to Parvaneh.
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“Shit. Ove would have hated this, wouldn’t he?” And then she laughs. Because he really would have.
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Because I hope I am unlike you in the smallest possible number of ways.
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