A Man Called Ove: A Novel

When he comes out of the shed with the shovel, the cat is sitting in the snow again, right outside his house. Ove glares in amazement at its audacity. Its fur is thawing out, dripping. Or what remains of its fur. There are more bald patches than fur on that creature. It also has a long scar running along one eye, down across its nose. If cats have nine lives, this one is quite clearly working its way through at least the seventh or eighth of them.

“Clear off,” says Ove.

The cat gives him a judgmental stare, as if it’s sitting on the decision-making side of the desk at a job interview.

Ove grips the shovel, scoops up some snow, and throws it at the cat, which jumps out of the way and glares indignantly at him. Spits out a bit of snow. Snorts. Then turns around and pads off again, around the corner of Ove’s shed.

Ove puts his snow shovel to work. It takes him fifteen minutes to free up the paving between the house and the shed. He works with care. Straight lines, even edges. People don’t shovel snow that way anymore. Nowadays they just clear a way, they use snowblowers and all sorts of things. Any old method will do, scattering snow all over the place. As if that was the only thing that mattered in life: pushing one’s way forward.

When he’s done, he leans for a moment against the shovel in a snowdrift on the little pathway. Balances his body weight on it and watches the sun rising over the sleeping houses. He’s been awake for most of the night, thinking of ways to die. He has even drawn some diagrams and charts to clarify the various methods. After carefully weighing up the pros and cons, he’s accepted that what he’s doing today has to be the best of bad alternatives. Admittedly he doesn’t like the fact that the Saab will be left in neutral and use up a lot of expensive gas for no good reason afterwards, but it’s simply a factor that he’ll have to accept in order to get it done.

He puts the snow shovel back in the shed and goes into the house. Puts on his good navy suit again. It will get stained and foul-smelling by the end of all this, but Ove has decided that his wife just has to go along with it, at least when he gets there.

He has his breakfast and listens to the radio. Washes up and wipes down the counter. Then goes around the house checking the radiators. Turns off all lights. Checks that the coffee percolator is unplugged. Puts on the blue jacket over his suit, then the clogs, and goes back into the shed; he returns with a long, rolled-up plastic tube. Locks the shed and the front door, tugs three times at each door handle. Then goes down the little pathway between the houses.

The white Škoda comes from the left and takes him by such surprise that he almost collapses in a snowdrift by the shed. Ove runs down the pathway in pursuit, shaking his fist.

“Can’t you read, you bloody idiot!” he roars.

The driver, a slim man with a cigarette in his hand, seems to have heard him. When the Škoda turns off by the bike shed, their eyes meet through the side window. The man looks directly at Ove and rolls down his window. Lifts his eyebrows, disinterested.

“Motor vehicles prohibited!” Ove repeats, pointing at the sign where the very same message is written. He walks towards the Škoda with clenched fists.

The man hangs his left arm out of the window and unhurriedly taps the ash off his cigarette. His blue eyes are completely unmoved. He looks at Ove as one looks at an animal behind a fence. Devoid of aggression, totally indifferent. As if Ove were something the man might wipe off with a damp cloth.

“Read the si—” says Ove harshly as he gets closer, but the man has already rolled up his window.

Ove yells at the Škoda but the man ignores him. He doesn’t even pull away with a wheel spin and screaming tires; he simply rolls off towards the garages and then onward to the main road, as if Ove’s gesticulation was of no more consequence than a broken streetlight.

Ove stands rooted to the spot, so worked up that his fists are trembling. When the Škoda has disappeared he turns around and walks back between the houses, so hurried that he almost stumbles over his own legs. Outside Rune and Anita’s house, where the white Škoda has quite clearly been parked, are two cigarette butts on the ground. Ove picks them up as if they were clues in a high-level criminal case.

“Hello, Ove,” he hears Anita say, cautiously, behind him.

Ove turns towards her. She is standing on the step, wrapped in a gray cardigan. It looks as if it’s trying to grab hold of her body, like two hands clutching a wet bar of soap.

“Yeah, yeah. Hello,” answers Ove.

“He was from the council,” she says, with a nod in the direction in which the Škoda drove off.

“Vehicles are prohibited in this area,” says Ove.

She nods cautiously, again.

“He said he has special permission from the council to drive to the house.”

“He doesn’t have ANY bloody—” Ove begins, then stops himself and clamps his jaws around the words.

Anita’s lips are trembling.

“They want to take Rune away from me,” she says.