Jonas Jonasson

Jonas Jonasson is a Swedish author whose The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of a Window and Disappeared became an international publishing phenomenon, selling over ten million copies with its absurdist comedy of twentieth-century history.

Jonas Jonasson was a media entrepreneur who sold his company and retired to the Swiss Alps before writing The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of a Window and Disappeared (2009). The novel follows Allan Karlsson, who on his hundredth birthday escapes from his nursing home and inadvertently gets involved in a criminal plot, while the narrative alternates with a picaresque account of his extraordinary twentieth-century life. Allan has been present at almost every major event of the century — the Spanish Civil War, the Manhattan Project, Stalin’s Soviet Union, the Cold War — through a combination of improbable coincidence and cheerful pragmatism.

The novel became a surprise international bestseller — it was rejected by a dozen Swedish publishers before being accepted, then sold over ten million copies worldwide. Its particular appeal is the Forrest Gump-like premise (the ordinary man who stumbles through history) combined with a Swedish comic sensibility that finds the twentieth century’s catastrophes simultaneously terrible and absurd. Allan’s cheerful indifference to ideology — he helps whomever he happens to be near without strong convictions about whether they represent good or evil — is both the source of the comedy and a kind of moral argument.

The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden (2012) and other follow-ups demonstrate that Jonasson’s formula is reproducible; they have been commercially successful if less celebrated. The original novel remains one of the most successful pieces of Scandinavian comic fiction in English translation.