A new adventure and encounter that begins by chance

Alan was taking a break in Bali, Indonesia after the events of "The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared."
An ordinary person would have been content to do nothing on a paradise island, but Alan was no ordinary person.
As his 101st birthday approaches, his friend Julius prepares a giant hot air balloon for his birthday party.
However, due to unexpected winds, poor pilot skills, and mechanical failure, Alan and Julius are forced to make an emergency landing on the vast ocean.
Fortunately, a passing ship saw them firing a distress signal and came to their rescue, but it was a North Korean cargo ship secretly transporting enriched uranium.
Alan lies to the cargo ship captain that he is a nuclear weapons expert and is taken to North Korea… … .

101-Year-Old Man Meets Kim Jong-un and Trump?!

The biggest change that has happened to Alan over the past year is that he has become addicted to the news.
After accidentally getting his hands on a tablet and learning how to use it, Alan is exposed to all kinds of news.
His stories of meeting with political leaders from around the world are both absurd and humorous, while also candidly exposing various issues in the international community, including nuclear weapons, disarmament, refugees, and neo-Nazis.
The hidden charm of this novel lies in the fact that as you follow the protagonist's journey, which is like a road movie, you also encounter bitter things happening in the world.

While the previous work satirized 20th century political leaders such as Stalin, Mao Zedong, Truman, Kim Il-sung, and Kim Jong-il, this work features current 21st century leaders such as Kim Jong-un, Trump, Merkel, and Putin.
Among them, the main targets of satire are Kim Jong-un and Trump, and the author mercilessly criticizes them as “two giant egos standing on each side of the Pacific, two useless lumps.”


The first half of the work is set entirely in North Korea.
Kim Jong-un, who seeks to smuggle enriched uranium to build nuclear weapons, secret agents from around the world who are monitoring North Korea while waging information warfare in South Korea and other places, and even the superficial discussions and behind-the-scenes battles taking place at the UN.
There will be some parts that will make Korean readers cringe.

“So I want to say, ‘I’m sorry’ to all these people in power.

And also, “Don’t complain too much, it could have been written worse”
I also want to ask, “Well, what if I wrote it like that?”
- From the preface

Interview with Jonas Jonasson

My 100-Year-Old Hero and the Secret of Happiness

As my taxi pulled into his home on the remote Swedish island of Gotland, Jonas Jonasson was wearing shiny orange boots and tossing leftovers from dinner to his clucking chickens.
Two years ago, feeling torn apart by a difficult life and a "tragic divorce," 51-year-old Jonasson moved here with his five-year-old son.
It seems an unlikely place to meet the author who has taken Europe by storm with a comic novel that has sold three million copies in just two years and is set to hit British bookstores next week.

We met not to talk about chickens, but to talk about his imaginative and hilarious bestselling novel, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared.
For a novel that had swept most of Europe, it took a surprisingly long time to find a publisher in Britain.
It is scheduled to be published in the United States in the fall.

While Nordic fiction has traditionally been dominated by dark and heavy subjects like Stieg Larsson's grim thrillers and the TV detective series "The Killing" and "Wallander" that have captured the British imagination in recent years, Jonasson's novels shift things towards a brighter and lighter tone.
Jonasson says it took him 47 years to write.

The protagonist, Allan Karlsson, is a kind of optimistic and hyper-ethical character, rather than gloomy or suicidal, a hundred-year-old Forrest Gump who sees no one as a bad person.

The novel begins with the old man climbing out a window to escape a party celebrating his 100th birthday at a nursing home.

While waiting for a bus, he steals a trunk full of money from a criminal organization and is chased by the gangsters.
A motley crew, including an elephant, gathers around him, and a series of flashbacks show his life as it becomes embroiled in major political events of the 20th century.
He tells how he befriended world leaders, including dictators, and even saved their lives.

A stunning satire on human foibles, the book has been translated into 35 languages.
Twenty film companies fought to adapt this novel into a film.
Among them, the Swedish film company NICE FLX Pictures won, and Swedish comedian and actor Robert Gustafsson played the role of Allan.
The film, which Disney is involved in distributing, is scheduled for release next year.

Jonasson admits that Alan is a character born from an exaggerated aspect of himself, and that he has become his own alter ego.
“When I was young and didn’t worry about anything, there was a little bit of Alan inside me.
“I lost him while working and going through various marital problems, but I was able to write my book by using him again in an extreme way.”

Even now, whenever Jonasson feels down, he thinks of him.
“Whenever I’m stressed, he’ll appear on my shoulder and say, ‘Cheer up, it won’t be that bad.’”

He needed Alan on several occasions, especially when he climbed out his own window and completely changed his life.


Now we come into his magnificent home, built in 1850, to talk.
In the hall there is a large incubator where several chicks have recently hatched from their eggs.
He considers the guys his family.
“I have six adult chickens, seven teenage chickens, and eleven chicks.
“I gave them all names, and some of them sleep in my bed.” “Oh, and do you ever get your bed dirty?” “Of course,” he smiles.
"But it's so tiny, even if you get it dirty, it's only a little bit." Have you ever accidentally crushed it? "Not at all! I always sleep with one eye open.
Just like when we sleep with a newborn baby.

We now moved into a very clean (and chicken-free) living room with hardwood floors, a sofa upholstered in a soft jade-colored upholstery, and pots of white and pink geraniums on the windowsill.

Before starting a conversation, he places two small tea bags of snus on his upper lip.
“Everyone in Sweden uses this,” he explains.
He speaks decent English, but when he can't remember a word, he turns to his laptop for help.

Jonasson grew up in Växjö, a town in southern Sweden, as the youngest of three brothers.
My mother was a nurse and my father was an ambulance driver.
Jonasson, who had always loved writing, began working at Sweden's largest daily newspaper, Expressen, while studying Swedish and Spanish at the University of Gothenburg.
And as soon as I graduated, I was hired officially at a newspaper company.

Although he was on the road to success by all accounts, in 1994 he decided to end his 15-year career.

"You could say it was the first time I went over the window.
“I didn’t really know what I wanted, but I wanted to live a different life.”

He became a media consultant, and a year later joined TV4, one of Sweden's private broadcasters, as a producer.
And within a few years, his media company grew into a company with over 100 employees.
“I worked seven days a week for 20 years, at least 16 hours a day.
I did have a girlfriend occasionally, but basically I was married to my work.
But even during that time, I occasionally wrote a few pages with the intention of including them in the book later.
“This helped me cope with stress.”

By the end of 2003, he had undergone two disc surgeries and was living in a constant state of "terrible mood."
One day, when he couldn't reach a sports star he was trying to interview, his heart started pounding so hard he thought he was having a heart attack.
“The doctor said it wasn’t a heart problem, but I was killing myself with stress.”

He stopped working.
“The doctor said it would take months to recover, but in reality it took years.
I received treatment, including medication for depression, but for months I was so anxious and exhausted that I couldn't even walk to the kitchen.
“I realized I had to change my life,” he says. In 2005, he moved to a remote area in Södermanland, on Sweden’s south coast, with his cat, Molotov.

“I sold my company for about 10 million euros.
It was fortunate that we were able to avoid harming that many employees.
Selling the company gave me freedom.
After living freely for two years, my condition has improved significantly.
I've been married to my job up until now, so I thought it would be better to marry a woman now.
But how could a 44-year-old man find a suitable partner in such a remote place? I turned to a dating site called Match.com, where I met a 40-year-old mixed-race Norwegian woman.
Our first meeting took place at Stockholm Airport.
The second time was at my house, and she stayed there the whole time,” he said. “It was a very difficult time for her.”
He looked very anxious as he said this, and his voice was low.
“Everything happened so fast.
“I was consumed by a desperate need to be loved.” “She said she loved me, and I wanted to believe her.
A few months after we met, she became pregnant, and we married in February 2007. By the time our son (whose name cannot be revealed for legal reasons) was born, the marriage was in trouble.
They moved to an apartment overlooking Lake Lugano in Switzerland to start anew, but it didn't help.
They were divorced in a Swiss court, with the unusual ruling that Jonasson would have full custody of the child and that the mother would have no access to him.

He decided that it would be best to return to Sweden quickly.
“Since the Swedish courts could not rely on the Swiss court’s judgment, they had to go through the arduous process again.
But the verdict was the same.
I wanted to get married so badly.
The result is an amazing child who is now my everything, and I can never regret it.”

He began writing seriously in Switzerland.
“When people ask me what I do, I have no answer.
I felt like I had no identity, so I thought it was finally time to become a writer.
Writing helped me move on from my trauma.
After I finished the manuscript, I sent it to six Swedish publishers.
Five publishers sent it back, but the sixth one called and said in a very excited voice:
“I’ve only read half of it, but I want to publish it!” I replied.
"Are you only going to publish half of it, or are you going to publish it all?" Why did it take so long to write a book? "Before that, I wasn't confident in my writing.
A good deal of my fiction involves getting into the heads of the world's presidents and prime ministers, and 20 years ago I wouldn't have dared approach Churchill's way of thinking, for example." Other leaders whose minds he has briefly entered include President Truman, Mao Zedong, General Franco, and de Gaulle.

"While I was writing, I asked myself, 'Can I really write like this?' and I answered, 'Just do it.'"

“The research wasn’t difficult.
I've always enjoyed reading modern history.
I've put together a lot of 20th century monsters, but not Hitler.
Although I know we can joke about everything, including Stalin, the Holocaust is something we can't satirize.
I think I've been satirizing humanity's shortcomings without losing hope.

He promises that the second book won't take that long.
“It’s the story of a South African woman who turned the world upside down.
"That's a very interesting story."

A difficult custody battle initially prevented her from fully enjoying the book's success, but life has improved significantly over the past few years, and she even plans to celebrate by buying a helicopter to make getting around easier.
And they say they've got a new partner.
“I met Marie during that time.
I'm a 45-year-old TV journalist working on a book program for the Gothenburg Book Fair in Sweden.
We are living together now and are planning to have children.
“I was able to trust people again.”

It was lunchtime.
While we were sitting eating gravlax (a Swedish dish of salmon cured with herbs - translator's note) and home-grown asparagus, a package arrived.
There were several envelopes filled with translations of this book, which would soon be published.
“This all feels unreal,” he laughed, unwrapping each package.
Just like his novels.

Angela Levin, translated by Lim Ho-kyung, The Telegraph, July 9, 2012

A word from the translator

Jonasson's novels are not as light as one might think, and the message he conveys is not as simple as one might think.
Amidst the bursts of laughter, there are chilling, sharp remarks that reveal the truth of life.
The translator personally translated Jonasson's works with a cheerful and happy feeling, but as time goes by, I feel deeply how true each and every word these books throw out is (for example, "Everything in the world is just as it is, and whatever happens in the future will be just as it is"), and I confess that I have gained incomparable wisdom and comfort in life from those words.