AggieH writes
Allan Karlsson crawled, as the Scandinavian titles more precisely have it, out the window and ran away from his old people's home just before his 100th birthday party was to start. Creaked away, rather, slightly weighed down by elderly joints and properly weighed down by a suitcase that he grumpily stole because his bus started to leave before the rude biker who asked him to watch it came back from the loo.
Now on the run from gangsters, the law and the nursing home's chief harridan, Karlsson acts cleverly and thinks drily as his fugitive life fills up with the interesting contents of the suitcase, a swearing red-head, a convicted murder, an elephant, a depressed chip shop owner, a variety of corpses and stolen transport, up to and including a railway track handcar.
Parallel to all this, Johansson takes us back through Karlsson's unexpectedly adventurous life. He spent decades drinking and thinking his way through life-changing (for them) meetings with historical figures including Richard Nixon; Kim II Sung and his 11-year-old son; Mao Tse-tung; everybody who thinks they invented the atom bomb (he really did, accidentally); Stalin; and Albert Einstein's clinically unintelligent younger brother.
All of which sounds absurd and all of which is, but in the best and traditional sense of the word. It's a farce and a fable. And as a fable should, it offers dark undertones including some delightful dictator-satire.
As Karlsson's down-to-earth character emerged and as various plot episodes were revolved, resolved and then revolved again, I was various reminded of Candide (response to a complex world: cultivate your beach garden); Pippi Longstocking (elephants as weapons) and Svejk (does Karlsson not understand the import of what happens in the world around him because he is too stupid or because he is too smart?).
Jonas Jonasson is an able, confident storyteller. Even Cervantes, and perhaps even Sancho Panza, might approve of Jonasson's ability to contrive multiple plot twists so brilliantly.
I was reminded more than once of Billy Connolly at the height of his digressive powers, when two hours after you'd entirely forgotten something he'd mumbled in passing, he suddenly referred to it again in a clever new context. (I was caught so unawares by a belated twist in the life of one of the biker gang 'Never Again' - even more culturally farcical in Scandinavian editions because it's 'Never Again' in English - that I was surprised into silence before I made the connection and roared laughing.)
Yes, the plot is entirely ridiculous, but only because Jonasson planned it that way in every deft detail. It's like the plot of The Marriage of Figaro: just suspend belief, enjoy the consequences, laugh aloud on cue and acknowledge the fact that no mortal will ever be able to recount the plot properly to anybody afterwards
And even though you do laugh aloud - not least at Karlsson's counter-intuitive approach to problem-solving, like standing outside the Bolshoi on a premiere night holding a placard up with his own name on it while hiding from the KGB - you will still pause for thought. In the opening pages, the ones that compelled me to read this book against my own will, the following made me pause and think about the strong bodies and strong wills that are unfairly hidden behind old age.
Karlsson, in his urine-splattered slippers, has taken an off-road shortcut in bid to get away before the nursing staff discover he's gone. Almost there, he meets a wall. (With apologies to the author, my amateur translation from Danish.)
"It was hardly more than a metre high, but Allan was a centenarian, not a high-jumper. Malmköping's bus and train station awaited him on the other side, and the old boy had just realised that this was where his shaky legs were taking him. Once, many years ago, Allan had crossed the Himalayas. Now that had been difficult. Allan thought about that, now, as he stood there faced with the final hurdle between him and the station. He thought so intensely about it that the stone wall in front him began to shrink down to almost nothing. And when it had shrunk down to its lowest point, Allan crawled over it, age and knees be damned."
alastairsavage writes
From the title, this appears to be merely the peripatetic adventures of a senior citizen. In fact, it's a black comedy that stretches across the chaotic life of care-home escapee Allan Karlsson.
Plotted with the same precision that Joseph Heller brought to Catch-22, the story is brilliantly deconstructed and reconstructed later in the novel. Yet, if the book is planned and ordered, the world it depicts is random and absurd. The 20th century is shown as a epoch dominated by ignorant, arrogant bullies. Major events occur not through the actions of the great figures of history but through drunken, half-forgotten conversations in the canteen.
Like all the great farces, it's really a tale about human folly and how people get caught up in the moment. All the great events of the 20th century seem petty in the light of the hero's advanced age. Jonasson's summaries of the causes of the first world war and the Spanish civil war have to be read to be believed.
The great mystery of the story lies in Allan Karlsson, the 100-year-old man himself. Who exactly is this slippery, mercurial character? Is he some kind of genius or just an ordinary guy who gets mixed up in events beyond his control? Allan also changes a great deal over the course of the book, so that it's difficult to reconcile his adolescent self with the subsequent events of his adult life. It's hard to tell whether we are supposed to treat him seriously, or just accept that anything is possible in this topsy-turvy world.
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared is a fun, breezy book that is crying out to be made into a road movie. It's also the perfect holiday read, except for the fact that you'll disturb your fellow plane passengers by laughing too much.
Jonasson is a master of comic timing, but praise should also go to translator Rod Bradbury. His crisp, clean translation reads very smoothly. It is strange that a publisher such as Hesperus that prides itself on translated fiction gives so little credit to his work (on my edition, his name only appears in a copyright line buried away on an insignificant page).
Get involved
If you have read The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared add your review to the book page and have a say in the final selection. The 10th title will be announced at the end of July.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion