A Man Called Ove Read Free Page A

concrete wall if you threatened them with a box cutter.
    Ove has a whole drawer in his useful-stuff box just for concrete-wall anchor bolts. He stands there looking at them as if they were chess pieces. He doesn’t stress about decisions concerning anchor bolts for concrete. Things have to take their time. Every anchor bolt is a process; every anchor bolt has its own use. People have no respect for decent, honest functionality anymore, they’re happy as long as everything looks neat and dandy on the computer. But Ove does things the way they’re supposed to be done.
    He came into his office on Monday and they said they hadn’t wanted to tell him on Friday as it would have “ruined his weekend.”
    “It’ll be good for you to slow down a bit,” they’d drawled. Slow down? What did they know about waking up on a Tuesday and no longer having a purpose? With their Internets and their espresso coffees, what did they know about taking a bit of responsibility for things?
    Ove looks up at the ceiling. Squints. It’s important for the hook to be centered, he decides.
    And while he stands there immersed in the importance of it, he’s mercilessly interrupted by a long scraping sound. Not at all unlike the type of sound created by a big oaf backing up a Japanese car hooked up to a trailer and scraping it against the exterior wall of Ove’s house.

3

    A MAN CALLED OVE BACKS UP WITH A TRAILER
    O ve whips open the green floral curtains, which for many years Ove’s wife has been nagging him to change. He sees a short, black-haired, and obviously foreign woman aged about thirty. 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.
    The Lanky One, by means of subtle gestures and signs, seems to want to convey to the woman that this is not quite as easy as it looks. The woman, with gestures that are comparatively unsubtle, seems to want to convey that it might have something to do with the moronic nature of the Lanky One in question.
    “Well, I’ll be bloody . . .” Ove thunders through the window as the wheel of the trailer rolls into his flowerbed. A few seconds later his front door seems to fly open of its own accord, as if afraid that Ove might otherwise walk straight through it.
    “What the hell are you doing?” Ove roars at the woman.
    “Yes, that’s what I’m asking myself!” she roars back.
    Ove is momentarily thrown off-balance. He glares at her. She glares back.
    “You can’t drive a car here! Can’t you read?”
    The little foreign woman steps towards him and only then does Ove notice that she’s either very pregnant or suffering from what Ove would categorize as selective obesity.
    “I’m not driving the car, am I?”
    Ove stares silently at her for a few seconds. Then he turns to her husband, who’s just managed to extract himself from the Japanese car and is approaching them with two hands thrown expressively into the air and an apologetic smile plastered across his face. He’s wearing a knitted cardigan and his posture seems to indicate a very obvious calcium deficiency. He must be close to six and a half feet tall. Ove feels an instinctive skepticism towards all people taller than six feet; the blood can’t quite make it all the way up to the brain.
    “And who might you be?” Ove enquires.
    “I’m the driver,” says the Lanky One expansively.
    “Oh, really? Doesn’t look like it!” rages the pregnant woman, who is probably a foot and a half shorter than him. She tries to slap his arm with both hands.
    “And who’s this?” Ove asks, staring at her.
    “This is my wife.” He smiles.
    “Don’t be so sure it’ll stay that way,” she snaps, her pregnant belly bouncing up and down.
    “It’s not as easy as it loo—” the Lanky One tries to say, but he’s immediately cut short.
    “I said RIGHT! But you went