The surreal tale of a 100 year old man named Allan Karlsson who on his 100th birthday abandons his drooling and dottery compadres in a retirement home and skips town for an intriguing and unexpected adventure.
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Genre: Fiction, Adventure, Black Comedy, Thriller, Action.
Publisher: Picador
Review in one word: Playful
The surreal and fun tale of a 100 year old man named Allan Karlsson who on his 100th birthday abandons his drooling and dottery compadres in a retirement home for an intriguing adventure #Bookreview #Books
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Loads has been written about this book. Loads of gushing praise all over the place. It has been translated originally from Swedish into a ridiculous number of languages and was made into a film. I intentionally didn’t plan to read it because of its stupid title!
I found a copy of this book for free on public transport. Even then, something about the title just the title sort of made me sigh and then cringe internally. This book just sounded really LAME. Yawning and bored and with no battery on my phone I reluctantly started read.
I will eat my words over and over again because it’s unbelievably good.
Anyway enough of me, the novel is the surreal tale of a 100 year old man named Allan Karlsson who on his 100th birthday abandons his drooling and dottery compadres, jumps out of the window of his retirement home and skips town.
If I go into detail about what happens next – it will ruin the story. Suffice to say this is hilarious and unexpected adventure story with a menagerie of colourful human and non-human characters who jump off the page and the interwoven tales stretch around the world a few times over.
The main character of Allan is like the Indiana Jones, Karate Kid and MacGuyver of Centenarians and he seems to always have a funny, wacky and stupid way of resolving issues. This narrative could all be a saccharine sweet cliched nonsense, but it’s not…there’s something deeply quirky about this story and the unexpected characters will delight you.
The seamless positivity of this book is immensely satisfying and it will hit you right in the ‘feels’. If this description from me makes your toes curl with cringe…please just give it a go. If you hate it, then burn it or leave it on public transport for someone else to find!
In spite of myself and my preconceived notions of this book, perhaps my latent bias and ageism, I absolutely LOVED this book. It made me realise that even if I reach the ripe old age of 100 there still may be a lot of things for me to do and achieve in life and a lot of things still ahead of me to enjoy – not just drooling into my cornflakes as society would have you believe.
If you have read this, please let me know what you thought! I would love to know.
Content Catnip 
I had exactly the same experience. So many people recommended me read it until finally I did. It was brilliant!
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