Once again I am coming late to this novel but applying the ‘read it/review it’ rule, here we are. If ever there was a book to which the cliché “if this is the kind of thing you like, you’ll like this” applied, then this is it. The Hundred Year Old Man was something of a publishing sensation in the previous decade and hung around on best-seller lists forever, spawning a sequel and inevitable film adaptations.

The rest of the novel follows in this vein – Karlsson goes on the run, accumulating accomplices as he goes, each instalment more farcical than the last. Interleaved with each chapter is the story of Karlsson’s extraordinary life. He was present at and played a part in almost all the main historical events of the twentieth century, along the way meeting Stalin, Churchill, Mao, Truman, and several other major political figures. Each encounter is played out along the same lines. Karlsson treats them as ordinary human beings, shares a drink or two with them, and emerges unscathed. Well, almost all – the meeting with Stalin is an exception:

The book’s title tells you all you need to know about the central premise. Allan Karlsson is one hundred years old. The director of the retirement home in where he lives small-town Sweden is planning a celebration for him, but rebellious Allan opts out – he, well, climbs out the window and disappears. Allan has marched to the beat of his own drum all his life, and is not planning to stop now. At the nearby bus station he meets a young man, who asks him to look after his suitcase while he goes to the toilet. Allan’s bus arrives and on a whim he takes the suitcase with him. Complications, as they say, ensue.

“I shall destroy capitalism! Do you hear! I shall destroy every single capitalist! And I shall start with you, you dog, if you don’t help us with the bomb!’
Allan noted that the had managed to be both a rat and a dog in the course of a minute or so. And that Stalin was being rather inconsistent, because now he wanted to use Allan’s services after all.
But Allan wasn’t going to sit there and listen to this abuse any longer. He had come to Moscow to help them out, not to be shouted at. Stalin would have to manage on his own.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Allan.
‘What,’ said Stalin angrily.
‘Why don’t you shave off that moustache?’
With that the dinner was over, because the interpreter fainted.”

The similarities with Forrest Gump are striking – Karlsson is a simple man who has no interest in politics or religion, and simply wants to know where the next drink is coming from. His simplicity is what allows him to endure five years in Stalin’s gulag and to go on to charm almost everyone he meets. I was also strongly reminded of Jaroslav Hašek’s wonderful 1920’s novel The Good Soldier Švejk in terms of Karlsson’s irrepressibility and simple good humour, although the Hasek novel is many times more subversive. The Hundred Year Old Man is simply a farce, with surprisingly little to say about the way we treat the old. or any other social issue.

It’s almost impossible to judge the quality of the translation, but I did have one quibble about it. One character Karlsson meets on his escapade, ‘The Beauty’ is, we are told, profoundly foul-mouthed. Yet for some reason in translation she speaks almost completely without curse words. Why these would have been edited out escapes me, unless people in the UK and Sweden have very different understandings of what foul-mouthed means!

Once the initial pattern of the novel was established, the repetition and predictability of the narrative became an issue for me. You know in the flashback chapters that Karlsson is going to escape from whatever scrape he finds himself in by some improbable stroke of good fortune, and in the present that he is going to evade the gang members chasing him for the stolen drug money that was in the suitcase, again by some improbable fluke. The interest lies in how this is going to happen rather than if, and the author is without doubt inventive in creating new ways for Karlsson to escape – in one episode for example a gang member is killed by being sat on by an elephant.

Overall I was disappointed with this novel. There was very little variation in tone, the characters were one-dimensional, and the plotting predictable. The premise is great, but the direction it took was derivative. Why this was so popular escapes me – what did you think?