The One Hundred Year Old Man who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

“The international best selling sensation”. Also the reason I haven’t put anything on my blog for a month or more. I cannot finish this book. It is sitting half read, blocking me from getting into anything else, and driving me crazy. I do so hate abandoning books. I really wish someone would tell me what all the fuss is about with this book. It’s about Allan Karlsson who escapes from an old people’s home on his hundredth birthday and through a series of slapstick mishaps manages to rip off some drug dealers. He teams up with a group of people and they go on the run with dealers and cops in hot pursuit. Interspersed with all this are tales of Allan’s youth and if you think the contemporary story was ridiculous, wait till you read these flashbacks. I actually find this book insulting. It’s like a cartoon but in words, simplistic characters, banal language, entirely focused on the narrative ( and then… and then…and then…) and containing nothing to engage with the reader. Actually a better description comes to mind: it’s like naïve art – Grandma Moses in prose.

Travels with my Aunt by Graham Greene

I launched into this book, which I should have read many years ago but didn’t, expecting something of the Aunty Mame of Aunt Julia (and the Scriptwriter) ilk. But this aunt is a seriously naughty woman. There’s no indulgent smile as you watch her get up to all manner of really wicked deeds: she is indeed utterly selfish, unrepentant and single mindedly bad. Despite all that I did like her and I also liked her nephew, the stitched-up retired and boring bank manager and narrator, who is in the throes of finding himself through the good offices of Aunt Agatha. Grahame Green is a ‘proper’ writer so there’s a lot of pleasure to be had in his language and especially in his wit. And this book is witty, a terrific satire of English life in the vein of Mitford and Huxley.