The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared
An amusing yarn, very readable. Not the best or most profound book I've ever read but enjoyable nonetheless.
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Daniel Waterhouse
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Damien Ryan
‘Since when has a lock stopped Julius Jonsson?’ asked Julius Jonsson.
you can’t imagine what the Russian alphabet looks like. It’s no wonder people are illiterate.
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.
Allan had always reasoned about religion that if you couldn’t know for sure then there was no point in going around guessing.
People could behave how they liked, but Allan considered that in general it was quite unnecessary to be grumpy if you had the chance not to.
Allan Karlsson didn’t ask much of life. He just wanted a bed, lots of food, something to do, and now and then a glass of vodka. If these requirements were met, he could stand most things.
But the victors from the war, the Soviet Union and the United States, had divided Korea into spheres of interest. And in the United States, they felt that you couldn’t have a documented communist as the head of the whole peninsula. So they flew in a head of state of their own, a Korean exile, and put him in the south. Kim Il Sung was expected to settle for the north, but that is exactly what he didn’t do. Instead, he started the Korean War. If he could chase out the Japanese, then he could just as well chase out the Americans and their UN followers.
Andrew Doran
This book is educational!
‘Your comrade…’ said Mao Tse-tung. ‘He’s not exactly an Einstein, is he?’ ‘Don’t say that,’ said Allan. ‘Don’t say that.’
Once you’ve reached a certain age, it is easier to sense when everything feels exactly right.
The evening papers, the Swedish tabloids, held out longer. If you had nothing to say, you could always interview somebody who didn’t realise that he too had nothing to say.
‘I wasn’t sober, admittedly,’ said the drunkard. ‘But I never get so drunk that I’d say no to four bottles of wine.’
This book is cracking me up.