The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

What's inside (9 sections)

1. The birthday party nobody attends
2. Julius, Benny, the Beauty, and an elephant named Sonja
3. Dynamite and Franco
4. Truman, China, and a long walk
5. Stalin, the gulag, and Herbert Einstein
6. Paris, Moscow, and a cat called Molotov
7. Bali and whether the joke holds
8. Key takeaways
9. FAQ

I picked this one up because a friend kept describing it as Forrest Gump with explosives, and that sounded like a joke that would wear thin by page fifty. It did not, quite, though not for lack of trying. Jonas Jonasson published the novel in Swedish in 2009 with Piratförlaget, and the Hesperus Press English edition runs 396 pages. It became a word of mouth hit across Europe, was translated into dozens of languages, and got a film version in 2013. The setup is irresistible. A man turns one hundred in a care home, decides the party thrown in his honor sounds miserable, and climbs out of the ground floor window in his slippers.

What follows is two books braided together. One is a slow motion crime caper set over a few weeks in May 2005. The other is the story of how Allan Karlsson lived to be one hundred in the first place, which involves nearly every major head of state of the twentieth century and a talent for blowing things up. The two halves take turns chapter by chapter, and the pleasure of the book is the way they rhyme. Allan never changes. History bends around him instead.

The birthday party nobody attends

Allan Karlsson lives in the old people's home in Malmköping, and the staff has organized a hundredth birthday party for him. The mayor is coming. The local paper is coming. There will be speeches. Allan, who was born on 2 May 1905 and has spent a century avoiding ceremonies, looks at the window of his ground floor room, notes that it opens onto the flowerbed, and leaves. He is wearing slippers. He has very little money. He has no plan at all, which turns out to be his usual method.

He walks to the bus station and buys a ticket for whatever bus is leaving, as far as his coins will take him. While he waits, a young thug with a large suitcase on a trolley treats him rudely and orders him to watch the case for a minute while he uses the toilet. Allan agrees, mostly out of politeness. Then his bus pulls in. Allan does what he always does when a door opens in front of him. He gets on, and he takes the suitcase with him, because nobody told him not to and carrying it seems simpler than arguing about it later.

The case belongs to a small time criminal gang with the grand name Never Again, run by a chairman type called Per-Gunnar Gerdin. Inside is fifty million kronor in drug money. So within an hour of escaping his own birthday, Allan has stolen a fortune from organized crime without meaning to, which sets the pattern for the whole present day plot. The police start looking for a missing centenarian. The gang starts looking for its money. Allan keeps riding the bus and wondering when lunch is.

I love how little fuss Jonasson makes about this. There is no inner monologue about mortality, no lyrical passage about freedom at last. Allan simply dislikes parties and likes buses. The comedy comes from the gap between what is happening, a major robbery and a manhunt, and what Allan thinks is happening, a pleasant outing that keeps getting interrupted.

Julius, Benny, the Beauty, and an elephant named Sonja

At the end of the bus line Allan meets Julius Jonsson, a seventy year old petty thief living in a run down cottage who has spent his life stealing small things and drinking through the proceeds. Julius feeds him, hears the story of the suitcase, and does the arithmetic fast. The two of them decide to keep the money and run. Julius is the first real friend Allan has made in years, and their partnership carries the modern half of the book. Allan provides total calm. Julius provides low cunning and a freezer.

The runner from the bus station tracks them to the cottage and things go wrong for him in a way that is played for laughs but is fairly dark if you stop to think about it. He ends up locked in the freezer, and Julius and Allan, with Allan treating the whole thing as a practical problem like disposing of bad meat, pack the body into a container bound for distant ports. The book later sends it toward Djibouti. More enforcers come. The body count grows by accident each time, and each time Allan reacts the way he reacts to everything, with mild interest and a suggestion they eat something first.

On the run they pick up Benny, who sells hot dogs from a stand and has spent half his life studying at university without ever settling on a profession. Benny can drive, can talk his way past roadblocks, and has just enough medical training to be useful when someone gets hurt. Then they reach the farm of Gunilla Björklund, a redheaded woman everyone calls the Beauty, who lives with a large dog called Buster and an elephant called Sonja. Sonja is the best character in the present day story and she is an animal. She eats, she wanders, she misunderstands situations, and at one point she deals with one of the gangsters by stepping on him, which solves a problem the humans had been failing to solve for chapters.

The gang keeps shrinking through its own aggression and the group's dumb luck. One corpse ends up in the boot of a Ford Mustang that gets shipped toward Latvia. Gerdin himself, the chairman, eventually loses his taste for the whole business. Meanwhile Prosecutor Ranelid and Commissar Aronsson chase the group across Sweden, always arriving where Allan was yesterday, building a theory of a criminal mastermind that could not be further from the truth. The funniest sustained joke in these chapters is the police file. Every new fact makes Allan look more dangerous and more organized, and the reader knows he is mostly following signs to food.

If this half has a weakness, it is that the deaths pile up in a way the tone cannot quite absorb. The book wants you to laugh at frozen thugs and flattened enforcers the way you laugh at a farce where nobody really gets hurt. But people do get hurt, and the story moves on so fast that it never lets anyone, Allan included, notice. I found myself laughing and then feeling uneasy about having laughed, which may be the point, or may be Jonasson not thinking it through.

Dynamite and Franco

The flashback chapters start with Allan as a boy in Sweden who discovers an early gift for explosives and gets a job at a dynamite factory. He is not political, not curious, not ambitious. He likes it when things go bang and he likes vodka, and those two preferences steer the next eighty years. When work dries up he drifts to Spain, where the civil war is on, and hires himself out to whichever side needs something blown up. Through a mix up involving a truck and a bridge, he ends up saving the life of General Franco, who is grateful in the way dictators are grateful when it suits them.

This is the template Jonasson uses for every historical episode, and you should decide early whether it delights you, because he will repeat it with different uniforms for three hundred pages. Allan arrives somewhere by chance. Powerful men assume he is someone important. He says something plain and apolitical over drinks. Something explodes. He leaves with cash, a friend, or a pardon he did not ask for. Franco gives him money and encouragement. Allan spends the money and forgets the encouragement.

What makes these chapters work better than the formula suggests is Allan himself. He is not stupid, exactly, but he refuses every framework anyone offers him. Priests, officers, and ideologues all try to recruit him, and he listens politely and goes back to thinking about dinner. There is something honest in that. Most historical novels explain the twentieth century through ideas. This one suggests that a lot of it happened because confused men with guns kept meeting other confused men over drinks, and one of them happened to know about fuses.

The cost of the approach is that Spain, like everywhere Allan goes, has no interior life. Franco is a vain officer. The soldiers are scenery. The war is a backdrop for a clever accident. If you want a novel that takes the civil war seriously, this is not it, and the book never pretends otherwise. But readers who know some history may wince at how lightly it all sits.

Truman, China, and a long walk

After Spain, Allan drifts to America and talks his way into the atom bomb project, where his practical knowledge of explosives makes him useful. Harry Truman takes a liking to him, and Allan, who treats presidents the way he treats bus drivers, likes Truman back because Truman is direct and pours a decent drink. Jonasson plays their friendship as a running joke about protocol. Aides panic. Allan asks about food. Truman laughs. Somewhere in the background, the most destructive weapon in history gets built, and the book keeps its eyes on the two men chatting.

Then the army sends Allan to China to advise the Kuomintang against the communists, and he loses interest, which for Allan means he simply starts walking in the direction he wants to go. He crosses Asia on foot with a group of communists he falls in with, over the Himalayas and into Iran, where he is arrested. To get out of a cell he offers the local police chief his services in a plot against Winston Churchill, who is passing through the region. He has no feelings about Churchill either way. It is only a ticket out of the room he is in.

I found this stretch baggy in the middle. Each stop follows the same rhythm, arrival, misunderstanding, explosion or rescue, departure with funds, and by the third or fourth country I could feel the machinery. The Vladivostok chapters later are stronger because Allan finally meets someone who changes him slightly. Here he is still a billiard ball, bouncing from Truman to China to Iran, and the comedy depends entirely on your appetite for famous cameos. If meeting Jiang Qing or bumping into generals makes you grin, you will be happy. If it starts to feel like a pub quiz, the pages drag.

Still, there is a nice undercurrent Jonasson never states outright. Every side in every war wants Allan because he can blow things up, and no side can keep him because he will not hate whoever they hate. His indifference, which looks like a joke, starts to look like the only sane response on offer. The book never says this plainly, which is to its credit. It just keeps showing earnest men explaining why this war matters and Allan nodding along while checking his pockets for sausage.

Stalin, the gulag, and Herbert Einstein

Back in Sweden the authorities have no idea what to do with a man whose resume includes Franco and Truman, so they underuse him, and the Russians step in. A Soviet contact named Yury Popov brings Allan to Moscow to meet Stalin, which goes badly the moment Stalin learns this is the Swede who once did Franco a favor. Allan is sentenced to hard labor in Vladivostok, and the book settles into its longest flashback, the one that finally gives Allan a companion who matters.

In the camp he meets Herbert, presented as the fictional half brother of Albert Einstein and in every way Albert's opposite, a sweet, dim man who believes whatever he was told last. Allan looks after him out of the same reflex that makes him feed stray animals. Their escape sets fire to a good part of Vladivostok, and the two of them flee into North Korea during the Korean War, posing as a Soviet marshal named Meretskov and his aide. They meet Kim Il Sung and Mao Zedong, and the fraud holds just long enough to become dangerous. What saves them is an old debt. Years earlier, during the China fighting, Allan once rescued a woman who turns out to be Jiang Qing, Mao's wife. Mao pays them off with cash and packs them away to Bali for a long holiday, which is the kind of ending Allan likes best.

Herbert marries a Balinese waitress, Ni Wayan Laksmi, renames her Amanda, and she turns out to be the most competent person in the whole novel. While the men drink, Amanda turns their stake into influence and gets herself posted to France as Indonesia's ambassador, which sets up the next act. I liked Amanda enormously and wished the book had twice as much of her. She is the rare figure here who plans, remembers, and acts, and her competence throws Allan's drift into sharp relief.

The gulag chapters are where the book's moral laziness bothers me most. A Soviet labor camp is not a natural setting for farce, and Jonasson gets through it by keeping the suffering offstage and the guards cartoonish. It works as comedy of survival, two innocent men muddling through a cruel machine, but it works by not looking at the machine. Readers who want the history to have weight will feel the absence. Readers who accept the book as a tall tale will enjoy the fire.

Paris, Moscow, and a cat called Molotov

In 1968 Amanda, Herbert, and Allan travel to Paris, where Amanda's ambassadorial post puts them at a lunch in the Élysée Palace with Charles de Gaulle and Lyndon Johnson, who is in town for Vietnam talks. Allan spots that an adviser to the French interior minister Fouchet is a Soviet spy, mentions it in his plain way, and Johnson is so pleased he makes Allan a CIA agent on the spot. The May unrest in Paris calms soon after, and the book cheekily lets Allan's tip take some of the credit. He is promised a medal and leaves town before anyone can pin it on him, because ceremonies bore him and he has learned that staying means paperwork.

Moscow comes next, with Allan under cover in the American embassy and Popov resurfacing on the Soviet side. The two old friends hit on an arrangement that suits them both. They write intelligence reports designed to please whoever reads them, flattering each service's view of itself. The reports help bring about Nixon's visit to Brezhnev, which is real history bent into the joke, but they also feed both sides' appetite for bigger arsenals, and military spending climbs. This is the sharpest satire in the book, and Jonasson slips it in without raising his voice. Two lazy men telling their bosses what they want to hear do more damage than any bomb Allan ever built.

As the Soviet Union falls apart, Allan goes home to Sweden at last and tries a quiet life. He adopts a stray cat and names it Molotov, which tells you everything about his sense of humor. When a fox kills the cat, Allan does what he has always done with grief and rage. He rigs a trap with dynamite. The resulting blast is enormous, illegal, and impossible to explain to the neighbors, and the authorities conclude that the old man can no longer live alone. That is how he ends up in the Malmköping home, waiting for a hundredth birthday party he never asked for. The circle closes neatly. The man who blew up half the century blows up his own garden, and the state files him away.

Bali and whether the joke holds

The two timelines meet in a finale that ships everyone somewhere warm. Allan's new gang, Julius, Benny, the Beauty, plus the reformed Gerdin and a few fellow travelers, fly to Indonesia with the money, landing at a luxury hotel run by Amanda and her sons. The police and the prosecutor are left behind with their mastermind theory in ruins. An Indonesian official approaches Allan with a job, and Allan agrees, telling himself that at least the president, Yudhoyono, seems sane, unlike just about every leader he has met before. Then he orders something to eat. The last beat is pure Allan. New country, new powerful men, same appetite.

So does it hold together across nearly four hundred pages. Mostly yes, if you accept the contract. The prose in Rod Bradbury's translation is plain and quick, built for momentum rather than beauty, and the chapters are short enough that a weak episode never lasts long. The best jokes are structural, the police getting everything wrong, history rewarding the one man who wants nothing from it. The weakest parts are the repeated beats and the thinness of everyone who is not Allan, Julius, or Amanda. Benny's endless unfinished degrees are charming once and then just a label. The Beauty gets little to do beyond owning the farm and the elephant. The gangsters are targets, not people, and the book needs them to be targets so you do not mind what happens to them.

I would press it on readers who like cozy crime with a high body count they are not asked to think about, or on anyone who enjoyed the film and wants the fuller history tour. I would warn off readers who want their historical fiction to respect its settings. This is a tall tale in the old style, the kind where the hero meets Napoleon and outwits him and the pleasure is in the telling, not the truth. Its view of the twentieth century is that leaders were vain, spies were gullible, and an ordinary man with explosives training could wander through it all unscathed by wanting nothing. That is nonsense as history and pretty good fun as comedy. Allan climbs out of the window on page one and never really climbs back in, and by the end I was glad to keep walking with him a while longer.

FAQ

Is The Hundred-Year-Old Man based on a true story?

No. Allan Karlsson is fictional, though Jonasson drops him into real events with Franco, Truman, Stalin, Mao, de Gaulle, and Johnson for comic effect.

Why do some editions say 2009 and others 2012?

Jonasson published the Swedish original with Piratförlaget in 2009. The English translation reached the UK through Hesperus Press in 2012 and the US soon after.

Is this the first book in a series?

Yes. It opens The Hundred-Year-Old Man series as book one, followed by The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man, published in 2018.