A Man Called Ove: A Novel

Many people find it difficult living with someone who likes to be alone. It grates on those who can’t handle it themselves. But Sonja didn’t whine more than she had to. “I took you as you were,” she used to say.

But Sonja was not so silly that she didn’t understand that even men like Ove like to have someone to talk to now and then. It had been quite a while since he’d had that.

“I won,” Ove says curtly when he hears the slamming of the mailbox.

The cat jumps off the windowsill in the living room and goes into the kitchen. Bad loser, thinks Ove and goes to the front door. It’s been years since he last made a bet with someone about what time the mail would come. He used to make bets with Rune when they were on vacation in the summers, which grew so intensive that they developed complex systems of marginal extensions and half minutes to determine who was most accurate. That was how it was back in those days. The mail arrived at twelve o’clock on the dot, so one needed precise demarcations to be able to say who had guessed right. Nowadays it isn’t like that. Nowadays the mail can be delivered halfway through the afternoon any old way it pleases. The post office takes care of it when it feels like it and you just have to be grateful and that’s it. Ove tried to make bets with Sonja after he and Rune stopped talking. But she didn’t understand the rules. So he gave up.

The youth barely manages to avoid being knocked off the steps when Ove throws the door open. Ove looks at him in surprise. He’s wearing a postman’s uniform.

“Yes?” demands Ove.

The youth looks like he can’t come up with an answer. He fiddles with a newspaper and a letter. And that’s when Ove notices that it’s the same youth who argued with him about that bicycle a few days ago, by the storage shed. The bicycle the youth said he was going to “fix.” Of course Ove knows what that means. “Fix” means “steal and sell on the Internet” to these rascals, that’s the long and short of it.

The youth looks, if possible, even less thrilled about recognizing Ove than vice versa. He looks a little like a waiter sometimes does, when he’s undecided about whether to serve you your food or take it into the kitchen and spit on it. The lad looks coolly at Ove before reluctantly handing the mail over with a grumpy “There y’go.” Ove accepts it without taking his eyes off him.

“Your mailbox is mashed, so I was gonna give you these,” says the youth.

He nods at the folded-double pile of junk that used to be Ove’s mailbox until the Lanky One who can’t back up with a trailer backed his trailer into it—then nods at the letter and newspaper in Ove’s hand. Ove looks down at them. The newspaper is one of those local rags they hand out for nothing even when one puts up a sign quite expressly telling them to do no such bloody thing. And the letter is most likely advertising, Ove imagines. Admittedly his name and address have been written in longhand on the front, but that’s a typical advertising trick. To make one think it’s a letter from a real person, and then one opens it and in a flash one has been subjected to marketing. That trick won’t work on Ove.

The youth stands there rocking on his heels and looking down at the ground. As if he’s struggling with something inside that wants to come out.

“Was there something else?” Ove wonders.

The youth pulls his hand through his greasy, late-pubescent shock of hair.

“Ah, what the hell. . . . I was just wondering if you have a wife called Sonja,” he manages to say.

Ove looks suspicious. The lad points at the envelope.

“I saw the surname. I had a teacher with that name. Was just wondering. . . .”

He seems to be cursing himself for having said anything. He spins around on the spot and starts walking away. Ove clears his throat and kicks the threshold.

“Wait . . . that could be right. What about Sonja?”

The lad stops a yard farther away.

“Ah, shit. . . . I just liked her, that’s all I wanted to say. I’m . . . you know . . . I’m not so good at reading and writing and all that.”

Ove almost says, “I’d never have guessed,” but he leaves it. The youth twists awkwardly. Runs his hand through his hair, somewhat disoriented, as if he’s hoping to find the appropriate words up there somewhere.

“She’s the only teacher I ever had who didn’t think I was thick as a plank,” he mumbles, almost choking on his emotion. “She got me reading that . . . Shakespeare, you know. I didn’t know I could even read, sort of thing. She got me reading the most hard-core thick book an’ all. It felt really shit when I heard she died, you know.”

Ove doesn’t answer. The youth looks down at the ground. Shrugs.

“That’s it. . . .”

He’s silent. And then they both stand there, the fifty-nine-year-old and the teenager, a few yards apart, kicking at the snow. As if they were kicking a memory back and forth, a memory of a woman who insisted on seeing more potential in certain men than they saw in themselves. Neither of them knows what to do with their shared experience.