It is Allan Karlsson’s 100th birthday and he doesn’t want to have a party at the Old Folks’ Home. Instead of going down to meet everyone, he climbs out of the window, gets on a bus, and has an adventure. He unknowingly meets a drug dealer and steals 50 million dollars from him, somehow rounds up a motley crew, ends up killing two men and getting away with it, and everything turns out all right in the end. Spliced in-between the chapters are vignettes about his past, and how this man, with little or no education, somehow had a stake in the biggest events of the 20th century. He meets several US presidents, Chairman Mao, Kim Jong Il, and so on, which make for an even more interesting read than his current adventure.
The problem is, I don’t like this book. I don’t like the tell-y writing style–nearly every single thing in there is “Allan did this and then he did that…” there is little to no showing, which pissed me off. This isn’t to say that I would want people to “show” everything when they’re telling a story–showing and telling has its place in fiction, and telling everything, to me, it not it. Although this tell-y way helps to contribute to the whimsical and comedic narrative, I did not feel that it was particularly funny. And yet, I somehow forced myself to plough through a book that was not particularly enjoyable for me.
The main plot was also rather dull and slow moving, and I disliked how, at every obstacle, everything worked out for the old man in the end through some kind of divine intervention, coincidence, and chance encounters. In fact, the vignettes of his past were a lot more interesting than his journey as a centenarian, and there were moments when the protagonist actually used his brain to get himself out of a predicament. But once the reader gets to the point where Allan is around 60-something, the narrative is so dreary and it’s not worth the time.
I only finished it because I couldn’t stand not finishing a thick book, and I regret wasting time when I could have read stuff that I actually liked.
4/10