The little old lady gripped the handles of her walker, hung her walking stick next to the shopping basket and did her best to look assertive. After all, a woman of seventy-nine about to commit her first bank robbery needed to project an air of authority.I suppose it needs to be said right off the bat: I was totally influenced to pick up The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules because it seemed so similar to The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared -- both books being Swedish sensations about "oldies" who escape their retirement homes looking for mischief (not to the mention similar titles, but this would seem to be a marketing ploy: the original title of this book is Kaffe med rån, which translates as Coffee With Robbery). In any case, I don't know why I was so easily tempted to read this book -- after not being particularly charmed by the hundred-year-old man -- and, once again, I wonder how much was lost in translation.
The beginning of this book felt very clever to me: A group of five retirement home residents -- frustrated by budget cuts that impact their care and freedoms -- come to the shocking conclusion that prisoners are treated better than they are: prisoners are given fresh food, daily fresh air, access to an exercise room, and hobby time in workshops. Convincing themselves that they would be hailed as modern-day Robin Hoods, this League of Pensioners devises a scheme to pull off the perfect, victimless crime, and after finding a way to use the proceeds to improve the living conditions in Sweden's retirement community, they would be able to take a nice, long vacation in Sweden's penal institutes. Capers and misadventure ensue, and along the way, we learn that not only do oldies deserve better care, but they have intellectual, emotional, and sexual needs long after we've cast them aside.
Although hailed as a comedy, this wasn't really laugh-out-loud funny, and after a while, the redundancy of the situations became a little dull. There were also far too many unnecessary characters (Juro, the blonde popstar, even Nurse Barbara and Ingmar) that complicated the plot without adding anything to it. At 400 pages, this is just too long. I've seen the writing here described as "functional" and that's probably the best word to describe it -- and again, this is probably a translation problem. For example, it is said of the ladies' man, Rake, at one point:
His greatest annoyance in life was that everyone called him Rake. True, he loved gardening and had once tripped over a rake and done himself an injury, but in his opinion that wasn't a reason for the nickname to stick for the rest of his life. He had tried suggesting other nicknames but nobody had listened.That's just plopped into a scene as ungracefully as that and left me wondering: is "rake" a play on words in Swedish, too? What was the point of stopping the action of a scene to give us this gripe? A better example of the writing is the following, which should have been emotionally touching, but came off as "functional" to me:
Martha often wished that she had a family too, but the great love of her life had left her when her son was two years old. Her little boy had dimples and curly blond hair, and for five years he was the joy of her life. The last summer in the countryside they had visited the horses in the stable, picked blueberries in the woods and gone fishing down at the lake. But one Sunday morning, while she was still asleep, he had taken the fishing rod and disappeared off to the jetty. And it was there, next to one of the jetty posts, that she had found him. Her life had come to a tragic halt and if it hadn't been for her parents she probably wouldn't have found the strength to carry on. She had relationships with several men after the death of her beloved son, but when she tried to get pregnant again she had miscarried. In the end she grew too old, and gave up on the idea of having a family. Childlessness was her great sorrow, even though she didn't show it. Instead, she hid her pain, and a laugh can disguise so much. She found people were easy to fool.I think that in the right hands, The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules could probably be a charming movie -- the points it makes about eldercare shine through the comedic parts -- but as a book, as it is written here, it left me cold. I'd give it 2.5 stars if I could but don't mind rounding it up, if only because I did rather like Martha, the titular little old lady.
