The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared, by Jonas Jonasson

In many ways, this book can be compared to Forrest Gump, a book about a somewhat simple man who finds himself involved in some of the most important political events of the 20th century and who also finds himself to be a neglected and overlooked centenarian who longs to escape from the rigid rules he finds himself being forced to obey in an old folk’s home in rural Sweden after blowing up his house to avenge a fox’s murder of his beloved cat.  Indeed, this novel, which runs almost 400 pages, is quite entertaining in the way that it shows the author’s fate being closely connected with his near total disinterest in politics as well as his massive expertise in blowing things up.  The result is a humorous and satirical novel that examines the subject of aging with dignity and dealing with the vicissitudes of life with a great deal of skill in a highly entertaining fashion.  A debut novel from a former journalist and media consultant, this book is full of biting irony about the folly of police authorities and the coercion that the elderly have to suffer from those who seek to micromanage the end of their existence, with a humorous and appealing core of characters that drive the madcap plot of the novel forward.

For the most part, the novel itself consists of chapters that cut between the surprisingly deadly adventures of Allan Karlsson, the titular 100-year-old man who escapes an old folk’s home and ditches his own 100th birthday in search of freedom and a fresh start and flashbacks to his life that are managed in a chronological fashion that all tie together nicely at the end.  We see how Allan’s unfortunate tendency to blow up his house leads him as an orphaned young man to be imprisoned and (imperfectly) sterilized and then later on to be stuck in an old person’s home as a homeless pensioner.  We see Karlsson learn about explosives, use that knowledge in the Spanish Civil War, help solve the problem of controlled fission in the atomic bomb, ditch the Chinese Nationalist side, find himself imprisoned in Tehran, escape the Russian gulag, work as an unexpected American spy, and eventually, in the present, accidentally steal 50 million kroner worth of drug money and share it among an unlikely group of interconnected people who eventually find their way to an unexpected freedom that involves the death of two incompetent criminals who try to recover their drug money.

In many ways, this book has an anarchical approach that skewers the importance of politics and politicians, as Allan finds himself sharing meals and saving the lives of such diverse figures as Francisco Franco, Winston Churchill, Chaing Kai-Shek’s domineering wife, Mao Tse-Tung’s wife (and later the dictator himself), the first two Communist rulers of North Korea, Harry Truman, Charles de Gaulle, and Josef Stalin, and even join forces with Albert Einstein’s not-very-bright illegitimate half-brother, who is, alas, no Einstein.  The book shows that a simple man with some very deadly skills can find a way in this world through divine providence (even if the author does not frame it that way) as well as the fact that his lack of interest in politics makes him less threatening to political leaders who merely seek to exploit his own knowledge of weapons, which he is happy to help other nations with so long as the people involved aren’t too imperious and bossy about it.  Thus a fundamentally peaceful if morally flexible old man finds himself responsible for massive amounts of death and destruction as well as nuclear proliferation, which is irony the author intends the reader to find as funny, and succeeds at.