In the beginning, I found The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, and especially the main character Allan Karlsson, to be charming and fun. Some quotes that struck me right:
The 100 year-old man set off in his pee slippers (so called because men of an advanced age rarely pee farther than their shoes)…
He was told that he shouldn't ask so many questions unless he wanted his ears boxed. Since Allan, like all children at all times, did not want his ears boxed, he dropped the subject.
Allan thought it sounded unnecessary for the people in the seventeenth century to kill each other. If they had only been a little patient they would all have died in the end anyway.
But I stopped marking these clever quotes eventually (the last is from page 52 of a 384 page book) because they soon started to wear on me and lost their charm. I also began to really dislike the main character and pretty much everyone around him. It's one thing for Allan to say that he has no interest in politics, but another for him to take no side in the major wars and skirmishes he's inserted into. In this age, and at my age, I have no patience for moral equivalence: I do believe there was a "right" side in the World Wars and I have no time for anyone who might argue that the 9/11 terrorists had some legitimate grievances. I could also forgive the accidental murder of the thug Bolt, but when Allan intentionally caused Bucket's death, he was no longer sympathetic.
I also grew bored of the constant insertion of Allan into major historical events, particularly because he didn't have an effect on those events. Like Chekhov's gun, I think if you put a character into recognisable historical situations, he should cause or change or somehow affect those situations. Passive observation, particularly without judgement, seemed pointless. The one exception was when Allan met with Kim Jong Il, the young second-in-command of his father, Kim Il Sung. Kim Jong Il was such a homicidal maniac in real life that I enjoyed this image: While the young Mr. Kim sat on Allan's knee, Allan talked with feeling about the bright memory of his last meeting with comrade Stalin. The mocking of the man behind the atmosphere of Escape from Camp 14 is fitting, and I just wish that Jonas Jonasson had given the same treatment to Mao and Stalin and Franco.
By the end, I felt that The 100-Year-Old Man just fizzled out. The Detective/Prosecutor subplot pretty much collapsed under the weight of the nonsensical "suitcase full of bibles" alibi and then they all live happily ever after. Yawn.
And so while I was put in mind of Ikea when I started reading this book, and then wondered if I was stooping to cliches, I think in the end it's the perfect comparison : Reading The 100-Year-Old Man is like buying book shelves at Ikea. At first they look nice, fitting together cleverly, but the more you look at them, the more you notice the nicks and scratches that appear, and if you hang onto them too long, they will likely collapse due to poor structure and cheap materials.
I would probably give this book 2.5 stars if I could, to rank it slightly below the other books I only just liked, but since I did appreciate some of the writing and the obvious historical research that went into it, I need to round it up.
