A Man Called Ove: A Novel Read Free

and council bigwigs going to strip clubs and selling apartment leases under the table. Tax havens and share portfolios. No one wants to work. A country full of people who just want to have lunch all day.
    “Won’t it be nice to slow down a bit?” they said to Ove yesterday at work. While explaining that there was a lack of employment prospects and so they were “retiring the older generation.” A third of a century in the same workplace, and that’s how they refer to Ove. Suddenly he’s a bloody “generation.” Because nowadays people are all thirty-one and wear too-tight trousers and no longer drink normal coffee. And don’t want to take responsibility. A shed-load of men with elaborate beards, changing jobs and changing wives and changing their car makes. Just like that. Whenever they feel like it.
    Ove glares out of the window. The poser is jogging. Not that Ove is provoked by jogging. Not at all. 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. Either they walk fast or they run slowly, that’s what joggers do. It’s a forty-year-old man’s way of telling the world that he can’t do anything right. Is it really necessary to dress up as a fourteen-year-old Romanian gymnast in order to be able to do it? Or the Olympic tobogganing team? Just because one shuffles aimlessly around the block for three quarters of an hour?
    And the poser has a girlfriend. Ten years younger. The Blond Weed, Ove calls her. Tottering around the streets like an inebriated panda on heels as long as box wrenches, with clown paint all over her face and sunglasses so big that one can’t tell whether they’re a pair of glasses or some kind of helmet. She also has one of those handbag animals, running about off the leash and pissing on the paving stones outside Ove’s house. She thinks Ove doesn’t notice, but Ove always notices.
    His life was never supposed to be like this. Full stop. “Won’t it be nice taking it a bit easy?” they said to him at work yesterday. And now Ove stands here by his oiled kitchen countertop. It’s not supposed to be a job for a Tuesday afternoon.
    He looks out the window at the identical house opposite. A family with children has just moved in there. Foreigners, apparently. He doesn’t know yet what sort of car they have. Probably something Japanese, God help them. Ove nods to himself, as if he just said something which he very much agrees with. Looks up at the living room ceiling. He’s going to put up a hook there today. And he doesn’t mean any kind of hook. Every IT consultant trumpeting some data-code diagnosis and wearing one of those non-gender-specific cardigans they all have to wear these days would put up a hook any old way. But Ove’s hook is going to be as solid as a rock. He’s going to screw it in so hard that when the house is demolished it’ll be the last thing standing.
    In a few days there’ll be some stuck-up real estate agent standing here with a tie knot as big as a baby’s head, banging on about “renovation potential” and “spatial efficiency,” and he’ll have all sorts of opinions about Ove, the bastard. But he won’t be able to say a word about Ove’s hook.
    On the floor in the living room is one of Ove’s “useful-stuff” boxes. That’s how they divide up the house. All the things Ove’s wife has bought are “lovely” or “homey.” Everything Ove buys is useful. Stuff with a function. He keeps them in two different boxes, one big and one small. This is the small one. Full of screws and nails and wrench sets and that sort of thing. People don’t have useful things anymore. People just have shit. Twenty pairs of shoes but they never know where the shoehorn is; houses filled with microwave ovens and flat-screen televisions, yet they couldn’t tell you which anchor bolt to use for a