The Swedish writer and journalist Jonas Jonasson is having remarkable international success with his first novel “The Centenarian Who Climbed Out Through the Window and Disappeared”.
Last week the novel went to number one on the in the Catalan language fiction list while holding the third place on the Spanish language fiction list. The book is achieving great success selling in other European countries too, such as France, Italy, Netherlands and Germany, and now also in the UK and the U.S. as the English translation came out later.
After the huge success of Jonasson’s novel in Sweden, where it became the best selling book in 2010, the novel has been translated into some 20 languages, with rights of translation into 30 languages. The copy sales have already amounted to 2. 000 000 books worldwide, having the novel also received the Booksellers Award Prize in Sweden.
“The Centenarian Who Climbed Out Through the Window and Disappeared” has been lauded by it’s readers especially because of the hilarious humor of it’s author. According to Jonasson’s talent agent, Anna Soler-Pont, the book was very discussed on the 2011 summer vacations, when the British tourists had witnessed the explicit laughter of the French and German tourists who were reading Jonasson’s book while taking sun in the European beaches, and therefore demanded to know where they could find the English translation of such an exhilarating novel.
The book tells the story of an elderly man, Allan, who is retiring to live his last years in a nursing home thinking it will be his final fate in this life. However his health could not be better and one day he reaches his 100th birthday. All residential staff and even the press are waiting at him in such an important celebration, but Allan doesn’t want to be part of it deciding to jump out the window and disappear. From this point on the novel tells the one month lasting journey of Allan across Sweden and on how he gets into various problems, which seem to be parallelly related with the major historical events of the twentieth century. Serving this journey as allegoria for the recent world history, Allan will not only witness the most important events of the last century, or meet some of its most prominent personalities such as Stalin, Churchill, Truman, Franco, Mao or De Gaulle, but he turns out to be the person who actually causes these historical events becoming an expert in the development of the atomic bomb.
The book reviews have treated well Jonasson’s novel, attributing him the qualities of warm humor with political and social satire, in the frame of the world history.
“The Centenarian Who Climbed Out Through the Window and Disappeared” is Jonasson’s first novel, being its original Swedish publisher Piratförlaget. The rights of the novel have been sold to the Swedish production companies Nice Entertainment and FLX Film in order to make a movie and a television series out of it. According to the literary Agency Pontas, which represents Jonasson, the rights of the novel are being negotiated with Hollywood producers for an American remake.
