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

On his 100th birthday, the main character, Allan Karlsson, escapes from the retirement home and, at a bus stop, grabs a stranger’s bag containing fifty million kronor. Alongside the present-day events—in which a love story, a thriller involving explosions, bandits who are more or less alive, and an unmistakably very live elephant all become tangled together—Jonas Jonasson tells the story of Allan’s fantastic life. “A rollicking, well-deserved novel of lies with a little truth mixed in,” publisher Piratförlaget wrote about Jonasson’s debut novel when it was released in 2009. “The novel offers a comic way of looking at the most important events of the last century and their impact on our lives. The centenarian Allan Karlsson stresses that politics doesn’t interest him; what matters is having something to eat and drink. His so-called neutrality sets off a series of catastrophic events in world history. I find this very relevant as a way of showing the apolitical influence on the processes around us,” says Mārtiņš Eihe, director of this carnivalesque, dynamic production.