Book Review

(Written by someone who enjoys a good book)

The 100-Year-Old Man who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson, Translated by Rod Bradbury

This is a book I enjoyed very much from beginning to end. The story begins in a nursing home in Sweden where the hero, Allan Karlsson, is getting ready to attend the party organised by the home for his 100th birthday. Reflecting on life in the home, he decides he would rather not and climbs out of the window and walks away. Allan intends to travel as far away as he can with the cash he has in his pockets. He walks to the bus station and after buying a ticket he meets a young man with a large suitcase. The young man tells Allan to look after the suitcase while he goes to the toilet because the case is too big for him to take in. Before he returns, Allan’s bus arrives and he decides to board with the case. So the adventure begins. It turns out the suitcase is full of cash from a drug deal carried out by a rather inept gang, and first the young man and then various other gang members track Allan down. Two end up dead, leaving the gang boss to do the job himself. Throughout the book there are flashbacks to Allan’s past life beginning with his first job at a dynamite factory. In his spare time, he experiments with explosives on a piece of land he owns and accidentally blows up the local shopkeeper whose malfunctioning car happens to roll up and stop over an explosive charge just as Allan sets it off. Allan’s explosive expertise takes him all over the world. During the Spanish Civil War while blowing up a bridge, he saves General Franco. In the United States, he comes up with the method of detonating the atomic bomb. In China, he manages to rescue Mao Zhedong’s wife from Kuomintang soldiers. In Iran, he’s forced to help a police chief in a plan to assassinate Winston Churchill but instead blows him up and escapes. He then finds himself in Russia, then North Korea, Bali, France, Russia again and eventually back to Sweden. Meanwhile Allan’s present-day story unfolds with both the drug gang and the police, who consider him a missing person, on his trail. He manages to escape both and eventually returns to Bali. Along the way there’s a cast of colourful characters. Aside from fictional encounters with actual historical figures like General Franco, Robert Oppenheimer, Harry S. Truman, Josef Stalin and Kim Il Sung, the fictional characters mostly have somewhat dodgy if not actual criminal pasts. The translation is well done in that I didn’t get the impression that I was reading a book which hadn’t been written in English originally. The writing flows easily and the descriptions of the characters and situations are engaging, interesting and humorous.