The Hundred Year-Old Man Who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared - maybe the title's too long?

The Hundred Year-Old Man Who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson (Hesperus Press: 2012). A bizarre tale of a man who traversed the 20th century, inadvertently influencing world events as he goes. As he turns 100, he escapes from his own birthday party to embark on a last adventure, involving a criminal gang, a suitcase full of money, an elephant, and multiple murders.

I’m never sure with translations. I’m a mono-linguist - I can order a cup of coffee in Germany, but that’s about it. So I have no idea how the process of translating a book goes.

Surely the translator takes on a lot of responsibility for tone and style? “Feel” is an important (if unhelpfully vague) characteristic for a book. How do you make sure you’re getting the same one in both languages? How do you make sure you achieve in English what the writer was going for in Swedish?

I bring this up because as far as “feel” goes, I loved this book. It reminded me strongly of another writer who also relies on translation - Andrey Kurkov. Both Kurkov and Jonasson write with an incredibly spare, matter of fact, short, punchy, frank style. I love it. It’s unadorned and achieves an innocent effect.

It fits perfectly with the straightforwardness of the main protagonists, and it contrasts neatly with the surrealism of the story lines - the bizarre twists and turns. Nothing is heralded with a chorus of trumpets. Everything is simply related as if it’s the most ordinary tale in the world (though of course it’s not).

But are Kurkov and Jonasson two writers with the same style, or do they just have similar translators? Or maybe Swedish and Ukrainian are simply very economic languages, and all Swedish and Ukrainian books are like this? Somebody could probably tell me the answer, but as of right now, I do not know.

I probably shouldn’t care. I should probably have stopped at “I loved this book”.

Whatever the reason for the style and tone, it grabbed me and it didn’t let me go. It’s a long-ish book (around 400 pages), but it didn’t grow old for me (pun entirely intended). I smirked every time Allan Karlsson got out of a tight corner with nothing more than a brand of naïve logic. I was intrigued every time he met another world figure without showing an ounce of awe. I grew fonder of him every time he related his incredibly simple outlook on life. His quirks and the quirks of those around him entertained me from beginning to end. The end itself was perhaps a little drawn out, with Jonasson continuing to mutter on for a few pages after the story itself was clearly finished, but I'll forgive him that.

I know people who disagree. I know people who got irritated with the lack of plausibility. People who feel this is a book with a neat trick which it plays far too many times. And I can see their point. That’s the problem with absurdity - it can have a short shelf life. But tell that to Dickens and the Pickwick Papers. Tell that to Evelyn Waugh andto  P.G. Wodehouse. If it’s done well, a little farce can go a long way.

I really enjoyed Andrey Kurkov when I first found him. Jonasson seems a pretty close contemporary of his. OK, so I don’t have the same feel that I’ve uncovered a hidden gem - this book has been in the hand of a lot of commuters in the last few months. But that didn’t take the shine off for me.

Bottom line - I enjoyed reading this, and I hope you will too.

8 GBR

Deserves at least as much as Death and the Penguin.

Next week, I may have to enny-meeny-miny-mo it. I have another Kurkov lined up waiting to be read, and Tom Wolfe is staring at me menacingly from my book shelf as well.

Over Seventy - the sixth biscuit

Over Seventy by PG Wodehouse (Herbert Watkins: 1957) A self proclaimed "autobiography with digressions". Wodehouse pontificates on pretty much everything, using his status as a septuagenarian to wisely survey the world before him and the life he's led

Having decided to treat myself last week, I couldn’t resist more of the same. I never could leave it at just one biscuit. Just one scoop of ice cream. I always had to have two. Or more often, three. Occasionally four. Five once or twice, but never six.

So the treat this week was Wodehouse shaped. I love that guy. Like most people, it started with Jeeves and Wooster (courtesy of Fry and Laurie). But once I decided to read some of the books, I was hooked in whole other way. Read about it right here (for those GBR novices amongst you).

This, though, isn’t another typical Wodehouse book or short story. This is a memoir of sorts. Not for ole P.G. the introspective story of a life well lived. Not for him the listing out of events and friendships that spanned his years. Instead, Over Seventy is his 200-odd page response to a request from a journalist asking for some of observations of the world now that he was officially an old gent.

I was chuffed that the opening of the book does at least go over some biographical details. I wanted to know how it all started for Wodehouse, and I was given the facts of the matter in fairly short form. I even found out one or two things about his “process” that surprised me (you’ll have to read it to find out for yourself).

But then the book deviates. As Wodehouse argues, any book of his life would largely be taken up with “and then I wrote another story, and people liked it. And then I wrote another story, and people liked it. And then I wrote…” and so on.

So instead, we’re treated to his musings on any number of topics and trends, generously interspersed with an anecdote here and a by-the-way there.

It’s warming reading. It really is. It has the same escapism and old world humour that his fiction does. It wraps its arms around you, deposits you in an old leather armchair, lights the fire, puts a glass of port in your hand, locks the world outside, and does a thoroughly good job of entertaining you. It’s easy, and that’s its power. It comes off the page in the honeyed tones of your granddad.

All the more impressive given the work that’s gone into this. Wodehouse admits himself that he goes through small forests worth of paper in planning his books. Each sentence is formed, reformed, redrafted, edited, reshaped. He went to a lot of trouble to make his writing what it is.

There is a Wodehousian downside though, and one I’ve not come across before. With his other stories, there’s always a strong sense of “what next.” The scenarios he concocts are often complex and tension ridden. With this though, there was no real point. No end game. It’s more a collection of what he thinks about stuff.

Endearing, funny, clever, insightful in parts. But nothing to make you grab it and thirstily drink up a few pages, nothing to make you absolutely positively have to find out what happens. I wouldn’t dare go as far as to say it dragged (this is Wodehouse, after all) but the lack of urgency was an occasional but definite drawback.

Still huge amounts of fun though. Still something I loved. Still a writer that makes me feel wonderful to read.

8 GBR

Go read some Wodehouse. Now.

Next week, I may have to go back to reading something I don’t already love. I guess.

The World of Jeeves - a perfect world

The World of Jeeves by PG Wodehouse (Arrow Books, 2008) An omnibus of Jeeves and Wooster stories. (I feel silly even explaining what Jeeves and Wooster is about. If you don’t know already, shame on you. But, for the sake of form...) A series of short stories following the life of Bertie Wooster, one of a society of idle rich in a comic world created by one of the world’s greatest ever writers of sunny slapstick. Jeeves is Wooster’s “man”, taking care of every little thing for him, displaying a quiet cunning and an intelligence that contrasts sharply with his master’s loveable pompous idiocy. (There, did I catch it properly? No, I didn’t think so either...)

Here’s a GBR first. A review of a book that I haven’t finished.  But I couldn’t help myself.

We’ve all seen Jeeves and Wooster on the telly, Fry and Laurie flexing their finest comedy muscles in a setting that seems made for them. The perfectness of their performance made me avoid the original for a while. I didn’t want to spoil it for myself. I didn’t want the Fry and Laurie version to be sullied by a version that failed to live up to them.

But, of course, PG Wodehouse didn’t write a version of Jeeves and Wooster. It’s Fry and Laurie that are doing the interpreting here. Wodehouse is the creator of this world, so sooner or later I had to dip in to see where the spark came from.

So I got this omnibus. Thirty-four Jeeves and Wooster stories, all about 20 or 30 pages long. Each following on from the last, all connected, all neatly packaged.

And that’s a key word, I think – “neat.” I’m not sure I can tell you anything you don’t already know about the worlds that Wodehouse creates. They’re all just plain wonderful. Sunny. Delightful. Pleasant. Comic. Wry. Warming. Consistently all these things. But neat too. It all adds up. It all plays out to a neat conclusion. It’s rewarding and fulfilling. It just all makes sense.

But why an omnibus? Why not pick up a full blown Wodehouse novel?

Well this omnibus has become my perfect reading companion, because it’s an amazing bridge between books. The World of Jeeves resets everything. It allows you to escape completely and come up at the end of each story utterly refreshed. After two or three stories from this omnibus, I’ve shaken off everything from the last full blown book I’ve read and am ready to get stuck into the next one.

And that’s how this book should be used. As the world’s most effective pallet cleanser. One day I’ll pick up a “proper” Wodehouse and read it start to finish. But in the meantime, these shots of Jeeves and Wooster are about as close to perfect reading as I’ve ever found.

I couldn’t sit down and read all 34 stories one after the other. If there’s a weakness to Wodehouse, it’s that the same plot tools get used time after time. After two or three of these, they tend to blend into one, and you can see what’s coming around the corner.

Not that that’s a bad thing. I love the structure of these stories. I think the world is a much richer place with them in it. If they changed entirely from one story to the next, they simply wouldn’t be Jeeves and Wooster. They’d lose their caught-in-time quality. They’d lose a lot of why I love them.

This book makes everything else I read better. It makes me happy when I read it. It refreshes me. It fills me with the life stuff that’s needed to attack something new. It is, without a doubt, the easiest GBR score I’ve ever given...

10 GBR

There, I did it, my first ten. And 100% deserved as well. If a book makes your whole life better, the least I can do is put all my thumbs up as high as I can for it.