Fredrik Backman

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

He remembered that he was quite happy and that for a few years afterwards he wasn’t—that was about it.

When they went home that night, he put his arm around Ove’s shoulders and said: “Ove, only a swine thinks size and strength are the same thing. Remember that.” And Ove never forgot it.

Then Mum died. And Dad grew even quieter. As if she took away with her the few words he’d possessed.

Ove had never seen a man as proud as his father was that night. He was eight years old and decided that night he would never drive any car but a Saab. Bookmark - Page 43 · Location 561

Had Ove been the sort of man who contemplated how and when one became the sort of man one was, he might have said this was the day he learned that right has to be right. But he wasn’t one to dwell on things like that. He contented himself with remembering that on this day he’d decided to be as little unlike his father as possible.

People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had. Chapter 8. A Man Who Was Ove and a Pair of His Father’s Old Footprints

But he never disagreed with her. Maybe to her destiny was “something”; that was none of his business. But to him, destiny was “someone.”

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.

Since his father’s death he had begun more and more to differentiate between people who did what they should, and those who didn’t. People who did and people who just talked. Ove talked less and less and did more and more.

He hoped this would make his father more forgiving about Ove losing his job, once they were reunited. He had to sit on the wooden

And so it turned out that Ove became a night cleaner instead. And if this hadn’t happened, he would never have come off his shift that morning and caught sight of her. With those red shoes and the gold brooch and all her burnished brown hair. And that laughter of hers, which, for the rest of his life, would make him feel as if someone was running around barefoot on the inside of his breast. 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. Chapter 9. A Man Called Ove Bleeds a Radiator

It was more an argument where the little disagreements had ended up so entangled that every new word was treacherously booby-trapped, and in the end it wasn’t possible to open one’s mouth at all without setting off at least four unexploded mines from earlier conflicts. It was the sort of argument that had just run, and run, and run. Until one day it just ran out. Chapter 12. A Man Who Was Ove and One Day He Had Enough

“You only need one ray of light to chase all the shadows away,” she said to him once, when he asked her why she had to be so upbeat the whole time. Chapter 14. A Man Who Was Ove and a Woman on a Train

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. Chapter 16. A Man Who Was Ove and a Truck in the Forest

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 around a piece of jewelry, and when this happened it was as if something started singing inside Sonja. And they belonged only to her, those moments.

“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,” she’d said gently.

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. Chapter 18. A Man Who Was Ove and a Cat Called Ernest

“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. Chapter 21. A Man Who Was Ove and Countries Where They Play Foreign Music in Restaurants

Sonja never found out the exact reason why they weren’t charged for any of the food they ate in José’s restaurant that week. But she laughed until she was positively simmering every time the little Spanish man who owned the restaurant lit up like a sun when he saw Ove, held out his arms, and exclaimed: “Señor Saab!!!”

Many years later it occurred to Sonja to ask him about all that. When Ove at last told her, she shook her head both long and hard. “So while I was sleeping you sneaked out and helped people in need . . . and mended their fences? People can say whatever they like about you, Ove. But you’re the strangest superhero I ever heard about.” Chapter 23. A Man Who Was Ove and a Bus That Never Got There

It was the first time since the accident that he heard Sonja laughing. As if it was pouring out of her, without the slightest possibility of stopping it, like she was being wrestled to the ground by her own giggling. She laughed and laughed and laughed until the vowels were rolling across the walls and floors, as if they meant to do away with the laws of time and space. 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.

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. Chapter 24. A Man Called Ove and a Brat Who Draws in Color

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,” Chapter 25. A Man Called Ove and a Piece of Corrugated Iron

And then he packs up the battery and clamps and corrugated iron and puts everything in the garage. Not because he doesn’t think those morons deserve a proper electric shock. Because they do. But because he knows it’s been awhile since someone reminded him of the difference between being wicked because one has to be or because one can. Chapter 28. A Man Who Was Ove and a Man Who Was Rune

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.

Afterwards it was only memories for Ove, and a lack of them for Rune. And there were very likely people who thought one could not interpret men’s feelings by the cars they drove.

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. Chapter 29. A Man Called Ove and a Bender

Ove stops at a safe distance from the counter. As if someone might give him a hug if he gets too close.

“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.”

Ove carried her upstairs to the bedroom. She nagged him for years about moving into the empty downstairs guest room, but Ove refused. After a decade or so she realized that this was his way of showing her that he had no intention of giving up. That God and the universe and all the other things would not be allowed to win. Chapter 35. A Man Called Ove and Social Incompetence

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. Chapter 36. A Man Called Ove and a Whiskey

Sonja used to say that Ove had only admitted he was wrong on one occasion in all the years they had been married, and that was in the early 1980s after he’d agreed with her about something that later turned out to be incorrect. Ove himself maintained that this was a lie, a damned lie. By definition he had only admitted that she was wrong, not that he was.

“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.” Chapter 37. A Man Called Ove and a Lot of Bastards Sticking Their Noses In

Maybe most of all they speak of courage. Sonja would have liked it, Ove knows that much. But he tries not to smile so much that Parvaneh notices. Chapter 39. A Man Called Ove

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. Acknowledgments

Rolf Backman. My father. Because I hope I am unlike you in the smallest possible number of ways.

Loving someone is like moving into a house. 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.