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

“Everything must come to an end, especially nonsense perhaps.”
But it was good kind of nonsense. Funny. Sweet. Highly plot-driven. The right amount of absurd.
“Allan considered that in general it was quite unnecessary to be grumpy if you had the chance not to.”

This book I picked up because I wanted to read something light (after reading very heavy GRRM books) and boy, this book delivered. Its light and funny and along the way tell you a lot about world history, in its own style, mind you. I am not saying this is history book, but author intertwines the story of Allan (the protagonist) with centuries worth of significant events spanning from Second world war, Chinease Civil War, Manhattan Project, Cold war (and subsequent nuclear non-proliferation treaties), to Korean war. I have to look up Wikipedia articles to see which events are real and which one are made up. But overall, book sets up a good background for story and you always get rooted for Allan, to see what he is going to screw up next.

Its translated book, and I think its good translation as I saw myself laughing many a time, especially for Allan's social inaptitude and for his general carelessness.

All 3 stars for this are for the quality of the writing and the fact I “know” it's a good book, it just didn't really do it for me. I'm not really sure what it is, but it didn't grip me!

Funny and charming. I hear the movie is good, too.

Interesting book. I liked it but didn`t love it. Worth a read.

An amusing and pointless romp perfectly suited for beach reading.

This book was all about plot. And the plot was clever but because the characters were so poorly developed, and so static, it didn't grip me at all and was annoyingly unrealistic.

It's a Swedish Forest Gump as written by Carl Hiaasen. Not exactly literary high art, but an entertaining romp with a mounting body count. Murder and mayhem with a side of slapstick.

Allan Karlsson has led quite the eventful life. An early fascination with explosives and a penchant for the drink has brought him around the world and in the company of Stalin, Churchill, Kim Il Sung, Truman, Mao, Albert Einstein's incompetent brother Herbert, as well as inadvertently finding himself key to the Manhattan Project, the Spanish Civil War and Reagan's Star Wars program. You can see the similarity to Forest Gump but instead of sitting on a bus stop bench proffering chocolates to strangers he, on the day of his 100th birthday, makes off with a suitcase filled with illicit cash which leads to both the police and a notorious biker gang, with less than generous intentions for his health, scouring the countryside looking for him and his growing entourage.

Story: 2 / 10
Characters: 6
Setting: 6
Prose: 4

Another miserable contemporary novel. I had the idea to read a book with my girlfriend. Sadly, she chose this one. I stopped reading it at about page 200 to let her catch up. However, after a month she said I had to carry on and return the book to the library. In the end, I've had to suffer through this book alone.
As for the book itself, I have little to say. Adventure stories often lack direction. As a result, they don't always work for every reader. In this book, I dismissed the story as ridiculous when the suitcase contents are revealed (page 20?). The adventure became progressively more unbelievable after that. The writing style appropriately complemented the events, but did not appeal to me much either.
Cannot imagine the movie being much better...NOT RECOMMENDED!

This must be the worst book I ever read. The story is not funny, it is like a five-year old trying to come up with his own version of Forrest Gump, while hopped up on sugar. I'm left with nothing but questions: How did this book get so many good reviews? Why is there an elephant? How can this possibly be a movie? Are all Swedes crazy? What is the point that the author wanted to make? Why did I read the whole thing?

This book was a RIOT! A must read.

January 2016 – Watched the Swedish movie based on this book last night, it was equally as good as the book!

I had to put down the english copy I started reading because it became apparent in the first few paragraphs that this book was poorly translated. Swedish colloquialism shone through and it was frustrating. In Swedish the book is well written with a lot of charm, I didn't get that sense from the English version. Quite the entertaining book and if you're not careful you may pick up quite a bit of history.

Although this book describes the last adventure of Allan, he sure had a lot of them in his time. I very much enjoyed the characters and their development.

This is the second book I've read this year about a man who has left his home and taken to the road and both books were European. (Is this a new trend in European novels?)

Road trips are old stories, I suppose, and yet also new. Maybe that's what we like about them.

The main character, Allan Karlsson, in this story is one hundred years old and this is probably more in the tradition of a fairy tale, a Forrest Gump life, than a novel of realistic fiction. Our main character has managed to fight in the Spanish-American War and help create the nuclear bomb in New Mexico. Even at one hundred, Karlsson continues to have adventures, getting caught up in a drama with a suitcase full of money and gangsters trying to get it back.

Delightful.

An amazingly funny little adventure :-)

Funny but a bit too cute. And I prefer a bit more realism or grit even with the comedy. Especially when the comedy includes Stalin and Mao.

Expect it would be funnier in Swedish, but a good translation.