The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by J. Jonasson
begins with Allan Karlsson escaping his nursing home through a window in order to evade the greetings at his forthcoming 100th birthday party. He goes across town without a specific goal and ends up at the bus station, where he chooses to take the bus as far as his pocket money will allow him to go.
The scene that follows could be considered a spoiler, and normally I would agree, but really, to understand what you’re avoiding, it is necessary that the bus will arrive in three minutes, so Allan takes a seat to wait for it, and in comes an irate young man with a suitcase too large to fit with him in the bathroom; he effectively commands Allan to watch it.
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by J. Jonasson
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Unfortunately for the young man, Allan’s bus doesn’t arrive until after he has exited the restroom. As he only has what he is wearing, Allan decides to steal the luggage because it might contain clothes he could need. It turns out that the suitcase is filled with Swedish currency, namely fifty million crowns… As the reader will no doubt surmise, the young man, who is now even more enraged, eventually pursues him, finds him (with a new friend Allan has just made), and after this and that, the young guy turns up dead, leaving Allan and his new friend with a corpse and fifty million crowns.
Allan develops into an apolitical and irreligious explosives expert who travels with his friend to Spain in the 1930s to fight in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republic. Allan blows up a bridge that would have killed El Generalissimo Franco but for the fact that he ends up in front of his car, which crosses before it explodes, and he is able to persuade Franco that he was actually a spy on the Fascist side and that As I have stated when hearing the fundamental Bolero melody…
