In less than an hour, social worker Henrik Söder was by his side. Allan was still sitting in his armchair, but the ambulance men had wrapped a couple of hospital blankets round him, which wasn’t really necessary because the fire from the house that had almost burnt to the ground still gave off quite a lot of heat.
‘Mr Karlsson, I understand that you have blown up your house?’ said social worker Söder.
‘Yes,’ said Allan. ‘It’s a bad habit of mine.’
‘Let me guess that you, Mr Karlsson, are no longer in possession of an abode?’ the social worker continued.
‘There is some truth in that,’ said Allan. ‘Do you have any suggestions, Mr Social Worker?’
The social worker couldn’t think of anything on the spot, so Allan – at the expense of social services – was carted off to the hotel in the centre of Flen, where the following evening Allan, in a festive atmosphere, celebrated New Year with, among others, social worker Söder and his wife.
Allan hadn’t been in such fancy surroundings since the time just after the war when he had stayed at the luxurious Grand Hotel in Stockholm. In fact, it was high time he paid the bill there, because in the rush to leave it never got paid.
At the beginning of January 2005, social worker Söder had located a possible place of residence for the nice old man who had happened to become suddenly homeless a week earlier.
So Allan found himself at Malmköping’s Old People’s Home, where room 1 had just become available. He was welcomed by Director Alice, who smiled a friendly smile, but who also sucked the joy out of Allan’s life in laying out for him all the rules of the Home. Director Alice said that smoking was forbidden, drinking was forbidden, and TV was forbidden after eleven in the evening. Breakfast was served at 6.45 on weekdays and an hour later at weekends. Lunch was at 11.15, coffee at 15.15 and supper at 18.15. If you were out and didn’t keep track of the time and came home too late, you risked having to go without.
After which, Director Alice went through the rules concerning showers and brushing your teeth, visits from outside and visits to other resident senior citizens, what time various medicines were handed out and between which times you couldn’t disturb Director Alice or one of her colleagues unless it was urgent, which it rarely was according to Director Alice who added that in general there was too much grumbling among the residents.
‘Can you take a shit when you want to?’ Allan asked.
Which is how Allan and Director Alice came to be at odds less than fifteen minutes after they had met.
Allan wasn’t pleased with himself over the matter of the war against the fox back home (even though he won). Losing his temper was not in his nature. Besides, now he had used language that the director at the home might well have deserved, but which nevertheless was not Allan’s style. Add to that the mile-long list of rules and regulations that Allan now had to abide by…
Allan missed his cat. And he was ninety-nine years and eight months old. It was as if he had lost control of his own spirits, and Director Alice had had a lot to do with that.
Enough was enough.
Allan was done with life, because life seemed to be done with him, and he was and always had been a man who didn’t like to push himself forward.
So he decided that he would check into room 1, have his 18.15 supper and then – newly showered, in clean sheets and new pyjamas – he would go to bed, die in his sleep, be carried out, buried in the ground and forgotten.
Allan felt an almost electric sense of pleasure spreading through his body when, at eight o’clock in the evening, for the first and last time he slipped into the sheets of his bed at the Old People’s Home. In less than four months, his age would reach three figures. Allan Emmanuel Karlsson closed his eyes and felt perfectly convinced that he would now pass away for ever. It had been exciting, the entire journey, but nothing lasts for ever, except possibly general stupidity.
Then Allan didn’t think anything more. Tiredness overcame him. Everything went dark.
Until it got light again — a white glow. Imagine that, death was just like being asleep. Would he have time to think before it was all over? And would he have time to think that he had thought it? But wait, how much do you have to think before you have finished thinking?
‘It is a quarter to seven, Allan, time for breakfast. If you don’t eat it up, we shall take your porridge away and then you won’t have anything until lunch,’ said Director Alice.
Besides everything else, Allan noted that he had grown naive in his old age. You can’t simply go and die to order. And there was now a considerable risk that the following day, too, he would be woken by that dreadful woman and be served the almost equally dreadful porridge.
Oh well. There were still a few months to go to one hundred, so surely he would manage to kick the bucket before that. ‘Alcohol kills!’ was how Director Alice had justified the ‘no alcohol’ rule in residents’ rooms. That sounded promising, thought Allan. He’d have to sneak out to the state alcohol shop.
Days passed and turned into weeks. Winter became spring and Allan longed for death almost as much as his friend Herbert had done fifty years earlier. Herbert didn’t have his wish fulfilled until he had changed his mind. That wasn’t a good omen.
And what was even worse: the staff at the Old People’s Home had started to prepare for Allan’s coming birthday. Like a caged animal he would have to put up with being looked at, sung to and fed with a birthday cake. That was most definitely not something he had asked for.
And now he had just a single night in which to die.
Chapter 29
Monday, 2nd May 2005
You might think he could have made up his mind earlier, and been man enough to tell others of his decision. But Allan Karlsson had never been given to pondering things too long.
So the idea had barely taken hold in the old man’s head before he opened the window of his room on the ground floor of the Old People’s Home in the town of Malmköping, and stepped out – into the flowerbed.
This manoeuvre required a bit of effort, since Allan was one hundred years old. On this very day in fact. There was less than an hour to go before his birthday party would begin in the lounge of the Old People’s Home. The mayor would be there. And the local paper. And all the other old people. And the entire staff led by bad-tempered Director Alice.
It was only the Birthday Boy himself who didn’t intend to turn up.
Epilogue
Allan and Amanda were very happy together. And they seemed made for each other. One was allergic to all talk of ideology and religion, while the other didn’t know what ideology meant and couldn’t for the life of her remember the name of the God she was supposed to pray to. Besides, it transpired one evening when the mutual closeness was especially intense, that Professor Lundborg must have been a bit careless with the surgical knife that August day in 1925, because Allan – to his own surprise – was capable of doing what he hitherto had seen only in movies.
On her eighty-fifth birthday, Amanda’s husband gave her a laptop with an Internet connection. Allan had heard that this Internet thing was something that young people enjoyed.
It took Amanda some time to learn how to log in, but she didn’t give up and within a few weeks she had created her own blog. She wrote all day long, about things high and low, old and new. For example, she wrote about her dear husband’s journeys and adventures the world over. Her intended public was her lady friends in Balinese society. Who else would find their way to it?
One day, Allan was sitting as usual on the veranda enjoying his breakfast when a gentleman in a suit turned up. The man introduced himself as a representative of the Indonesian Government and said that he had read some amazing things in a blog on the Internet. Now, on behalf of the president, he wished to make use of Mr Karlsson’s special knowledge, if what he had read turned out to be true.
‘And what do you want me to help you with if I may ask?’ said Allan. ‘There are only two things I can do better than m
ost people. One of them is to make vodka from goats’ milk, and the other is to put together an atom bomb.’
‘That’s exactly what we’re interested in,’ said the man.
‘The goats’ milk?’
‘No,’ said the man. ‘Not the goats’ milk.’
Allan asked the representative of the Indonesian Government to sit down. And then he explained that he had given the Bomb to Stalin and that had been a mistake because Stalin was as crazy as they come. So first of all Allan wanted to know about the mental state of the Indonesian president. The Government representative replied that President Yudhoyono was a very wise and responsible person.
‘I am glad to hear it,’ said Allan. ‘In that case I’d be happy to help out.’
And that’s what he did.
Acknowledgments
An extra thank you to Micke, Liza, Rixon, Maud and Uncle Hans.
– Jonas
Biographical note
Jonas Jonasson was born in 1961 in the small town of Växjö in Sweden. After language studies at the University of Gothenburg he became a journalist, working first for the regional newspaper Smålandsposten and then for Expressen. Some years later he started the successful media consulting and television production company called OTW. After more than twenty years working in media, television and newspapers he was completely exhausted and decided to sell everything, including his shares in the company, and move abroad. He left for the village of Ponte Tresa in Switzerland where he lived for three years with his family. During this time he finished the novel he had been writing for the last few years, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. Today he lives in the countryside on the island of Gotland in Sweden, with his son, cats and chickens.
International Praise for The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared:
‘First-rate’ Der Spiegel, Germany
‘A mixture of road movie and picaresque novel in modern packaging. A great pleasure to read’ NDR Kultur, Germany
‘Completely crazy, an incredibly funny story’
Aftonbladet, Sweden
‘It’s a story that twists and turns every action and word. The language is ingenious and surprisingly different’
Nerikea Allehanda, Sweden
‘The new international phenomenon… overflowing with humour’ El Mundo, Spain
‘Swedish black comic novel that reads like a road trip with Forrest Gump at the wheel’ NU.nl, Netherlands
‘Zany picaresque novel’ Trouw, Netherlands
‘Dynamite comedy’ Le Figaro, France
‘Hilarious… a publishing phenomenon’
Corriere della Sera, Italy
‘Incredibly charming, told with a cheery simplicity’
Dagbladet, Norway
‘Hilarious… a celebration of absurd humour’
Helsingin Sanomat, Finland
‘Bestseller joins the Nordic invasion of Britain. Hesperus Press … is likely to show its bigger rivals how wrong they were to turn it down’ The Observer, UK
Interview with the Author
How did you come up with the idea of making the main character of your book a hundred-year-old man who goes on the run around Sweden?
The story was among at least twenty others in my head. I started because of the book’s title – I immediately fell in love with it once I had invented it. I said to myself that I wanted to read a book with such a title; I only had to write it first! I also needed the main character to be a hundred years old to have lived through the whole twentieth century, to use him as a guide in the parallel story along with the road trip in Sweden today.
How do you write a book that becomes a bestselling novel?
I am sure there as many ways as there are bestselling novels. My way was to write a feel-good novel. They say that laughter prolongs one’s life. Imagine if I have prolonged someone’s life!
Are you just as funny in everyday life? You have to be, because it’s a hilarious story.
I think it was Mark Twain who said something like this: ‘To read an interesting book and then to meet the author in question, is like first having a great goose liver paté only to afterwards meet the goose.’ (I am sorry, Mr Twain, if I have remembered this quote incorrectly.)
How do you foresee yourself as a hundred-year-old man?
I hope that by then I will have Allan Karlsson’s care-free attitude. But – unlike Allan – I hope that I am still interested in political and social issues. Maybe I’ll go on tours to schools or colleges to make teenagers understand that life is an adventure, very much worth living (and that they ain’t seen nothing yet!)
What would you do if you were one hundred and had a chance to ‘climb out of the window’ and disappear? What kind of adventure would you like to experience?
I think that I’ve already climbed out of the window a few times in life. To me climbing out would actually maybe be to stay where I am now, with my son, the poultry house, the cat. To go to the village sauna each Saturday afternoon, to sit there among grumpy old men, just to be updated about what’s happening in the neighbourhood. But I think a lot of people really should consider the possibility of climbing out of their window. My perspective is that we live only once, I cannot be sure but that is what I believe. I think that if you’ve once asked yourself: ‘Should I…’ then the answer should be: ‘Yes!’ Otherwise, how would you ever get to know that you shouldn’t?
Reading Group Discussion Questions
What do you think are the central themes of the book?
Why do you think the author chose to make the main character one hundred years old?
Why do you think Allan climbed out of the window in the first place?
Did you enjoy the way the novel switched from the present day to the past? What do you think this structure brought to your experience of the novel?
The author uses modern historical events as a backdrop to the plot. How did you feel this affected your response to the novel?
How much of a person’s character do you think is shaped by the times in which they live?
What do you think drove Allan to steal the suitcase?
Did you prefer Allan’s character as a younger man or older man? Do you feel your opinion of him changed over the course of the book?
What do you think of Allan’s lack of political interest and stance and how does this affect the story?
Did you enjoy the use of humour? Which moments stood out to you?
What do you think of Allan’s laid back attitude to life and his lack of interest in love and sex?
Were you happy when Allan and Amanda got together or did you find it an unlikely pairing?
In what ways does the book explore the bonds of friendship?
What do you think all the main characters had in common, if anything?
Who do you feel most sorry for in the book and why?
If you were Detective Inspector Aronsson, how would you have handled the investigation?
Are there other any historical figures or moments you would have liked to have featured in the book?
Why do you think the author repeated the same paragraph at the start and end of the book?
Was the ending satisfying? Why or why not?
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Copyright
Published by Hesperus Press Limited
28 Mortimer Street, London W1W 7RD
www.hesperuspress.com
This edition first published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2012
This e
book edition first published in 2012
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2009 Jonas Jonasson
The right of Jonas Jonasson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Piratförlaget, Sweden
Published by arrangement with Pontas Literary & Film Agency
English language translation © Rod Bradbury
Typeset by Fraser Muggeridge studio
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–1–78094–033–5
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared Page 36