A Man Called Ove: Chapters 1–6

The colleague no longer looks quite as happy. He gives the first sales assistant an insinuating glance as if to say he’ll pay him back for this.

Nowadays, it was just self-employed people and other disreputable sorts living here.

It briefly scrutinized the fifty-nine-year-old man and his clogs, then turned and lolloped off.

Two years later, after Ove had been deposed as chairman of the Association (a betrayal Ove subsequently referred to as “the coup d’état”), the question came up again.

Even better, the video material erased itself automatically after twenty-four hours, thus avoiding any “breaches of the residents’ right to privacy.”

And that was because Ove did not trust the Internet. He accentuated the net even though his wife nagged that you had to put the emphasis on Inter.

A recent arrival, probably not lived here for more than four or five years at most. Already he’s managed to wheedle his way onto the steering group of the Residents’ Association.

Self-employed people and other idiots all drive Audis. Ove tucks his hands into his pockets. He directs a slightly imperious kick at the baseboard.

Ove couldn’t give a damn about people jogging. What he can’t understand is why they have to make such a big thing of it. With those smug smiles on their faces, as if they were out there curing pulmonary emphysema.

She stands there gesticulating furiously at a similarly aged oversize blond lanky man squeezed into the driver’s seat of a ludicrously small Japanese car with a trailer, now scraping against the exterior wall of Ove’s house.

After that, she immerses herself in half a minute’s worth of haranguing in what Ove can only assume to be a display of the complex vocabulary of Arabic cursing.

The Lanky One looks ponderously at the trailer wheels.

He smiles, undaunted, and adjusts his tobacco with the tip of his tongue. “Naah, come on, that’s just soil,” he persists, as if Ove is having a joke with him.

“I’ll move it and have another go,” he finally says and smiles disarmingly at Ove again.

“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.

He reverses while the Japanese car shrieks in terror, maneuvers the trailer perfectly between his own house and his incompetent new neighbor’s, gets out, and tosses the cretin his keys.

She thanks him with a wry smile, as if she’s trying not to laugh.

Then he nods, as if he might possibly be able to accept this premise as an explanation.

Ove keeps an eye on them as they skulk off.

He can’t understand people who long to retire. How can anyone spend their whole life longing for the day when they become superfluous? Wandering about, a burden on society, what sort of man would ever wish for that?

Then he took his jacket from the hook in the hall, the only hook of all six that wasn’t burgeoning with her clothes, and set off for his inspection.

Sometimes they end up doing six or seven loops before they find a good spot, and if Ove in the end has to concede defeat and content himself with a slot twenty yards farther away, he’s in a bad mood for the rest of the day.

Only once it was safely in did Ove nonchalantly swing into the other space.

Ove put his debit card on the counter. The manager allowed himself the slightest of smiles, then nodded dismissively and pointed at a sign that read: “Card purchases of less than 50 kronor carry a surcharge of 3 kronor.”

“There was no way I was going to pay three kronor,” rails Ove, his eyes looking down into the gravel.

Remembered how he longed for their mathematics lessons at school. Maybe for the others they were a sufferance, but not for him.

She smoked as well, all the time. That’s Ove’s clearest memory of her, how she sat in the kitchen window of the little house where they lived outside town, with that billowing cloud around her, watching the sky every Saturday morning.

On Sundays they went to church. Not because either of them had any excessive zeal for God, but because Ove’s mum had always been insistent about it.

Ove was left with not much more than a Saab, a ramshackle house a few miles out of town, and a dented old wristwatch.

At the funeral, the vicar wanted to talk to him about foster homes, but he found out soon enough that Ove had not been brought up to accept charity. 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.

He’s paid the undertakers and arranged his place in the churchyard next to her.

He has just never been able to understand them, can’t fathom how they do it.

Ove turns around and finds himself eye to eye with a whelp standing a few yards away.

On closer inspection he may be eighteen or so, Ove suspects. More of a stripling than a whelp, in other words, if one wants to be pedantic about it.

On closer inspection he may be eighteen or so, Ove suspects. More of a stripling than a whelp, in other words, if one wants to be pedantic about it.

“It can hardly be yours, then,” Ove states condescendingly.

He says it more with resignation than indignation.

His emaciated peach-fuzzed face is covered in blackheads and his hair looks as if someone saved him from drowning in a barrel by pulling him up by his locks.

Dissatisfied, he walks down the little footpath between the houses, stamping his feet so that anyone who saw him would think he was trying to flatten the tarmac.

Only then does he realize that she’s actually not gesticulating at the house. She’s throwing stones.