Chapters (44)
- Cover
- 1. A Man Called Ove Buys a Computer That Is Not a Computer
- 2. (Three Weeks Earlier) A Man Called Ove Makes His Neighborhood Inspection
- 3. A Man Called Ove Backs Up With a Trailer
- 4. A Man Called Ove Does Not Pay a Three-kronor Surcharge
- 5. A Man Called Ove
- 6. A Man Called Ove and a Bicycle That Should Have Been Left Where Bicycles Are Left
- 7. A Man Called Ove Drills a Hole For a Hook
- 8. A Man Who Was Ove and a Pair of His Father’s Old Footprints
- 9. A Man Called Ove Bleeds a Radiator
- 10. A Man Who Was Ove and a House That Ove Built
- 11. A Man Called Ove and a Lanky One Who Can’t Open a Window Without Falling Off a Ladder
- 12. A Man Who Was Ove and One Day He Had Enough
- 13. A Man Called Ove and a Clown Called Beppo
- 14. A Man Who Was Ove and a Woman on a Train
- 15. A Man Called Ove and a Delayed Train
- 16. A Man Who Was Ove and a Truck in the Forest
- 17. A Man Called Ove and a Cat Annoyance in a Snowdrift
- 18. A Man Who Was Ove and a Cat Called Ernest
- 19. A Man Called Ove and a Cat That Was Broken When He Came
- 20. A Man Called Ove and an Intruder
- 21. A Man Who Was Ove and Countries Where They Play Foreign Music in Restaurants
- 22. A Man Called Ove and Someone in a Garage
- 23. A Man Who Was Ove and a Bus That Never Got There
- 24. A Man Called Ove and a Brat Who Draws in Color
- 25. A Man Called Ove and a Piece of Corrugated Iron
- 26. A Man Called Ove and a Society Where No One Can Repair a Bicycle Any More
- 27. A Man Called Ove and a Driving Lesson
- 28. A Man Who Was Ove and a Man Who Was Rune
- 29. A Man Called Ove and a Bender
- 30. A Man Called Ove and a Society Without Him
- 31. A Man Called Ove Backs Up a Trailer. Again.
- 32. A Man Called Ove Isn’t Running a Damned Hotel
- 33. A Man Called Ove and an Inspection Tour That Is Not the Usual
- 34. A Man Called Ove and a Boy in the House Next Door
- 35. A Man Called Ove and Social Incompetence
- 36. A Man Called Ove and a Whiskey
- 37. A Man Called Ove and a Lot of Bastards Sticking Their Noses In
- 38. A Man Called Ove and the End of a Story
- 39. A Man Called Ove
- A Man Called Ove and an Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Copyright
In the following months, back in Sweden, Ove met innumerable men in white shirts. They sat behind desks made of light-colored wood in various municipal offices and they apparently had endless amounts of time to instruct Ove in what documents had to be filled in for various purposes, but no time at all to discuss the measures that were needed for Sonja to get better.
A woman was dispatched to the hospital from one of the municipal authorities, where she bullishly explained that Sonja could be placed in “a service home for other people in her situation.” Something about how “the strain of everyday life” quite understandably could be “excessive” for Ove. She didn’t say it right out, but it was clear as crystal what she was driving at. She did not believe that Ove could see himself staying with his wife now. “Under present conditions,” she kept repeating, nodding discreetly at the bedside. She spoke to Ove as if Sonja were not even in the room.
Admittedly Ove opened the door this time, but she was ejected all the same.
“The only home we’re going to is our own! Where we LIVE!” Ove roared at her, and in pure frustration and anger he threw one of Sonja’s shoes out of the room.
Afterwards he had to go and ask the nurses, who’d almost been hit by it, if they knew where it had gone. Which of course made him even angrier. 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.