I confess that I tremendously enjoyed The One-Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (2009). It wasn’t profound and it wasn’t great literature, but it was laugh-aloud funny and a delightful depiction of someone who is unambiguously old. The recently released sequel, The Accidental Further Adventure of the Hundred-Year-Old-Man,is not quite the masterpiece of comic satire as its predecessor, but it’s a welcome distraction in this time of unrelievedly bad news. But I think the reason I particularly like Jonas Jonasson’s creation is that I appreciate the way he depicts an older person.

The typical reaction to a one-hundred-year-old who remains engaged with life is of the gee-whiz-golly variety: isn’t he amazing! Or, if it’s a woman, isn’t she cute! The old person (and yes, I prefer the locution “old” rather than one of the more politically correct euphemisms) is treated as a curiosity, a zoo specimen, not as a full human being with all his or her foibles and failings. My bias is that we should accept people for who they are—whether they are 50, 75, or 100.

Then there is a whole area of research devoted to studying centenarians (for example, the New England Centenarian Study).The prevailing wisdom is that centenarians are a special breed who have managed to make it to a ripe old age through a combination of genetics, lifestyle and, I would add, luck. Part of what makes them special, in this view, is that they have been spared many of the chronic diseases of old age, suffering perhaps from osteoarthritis, farsightedness (in the medical sense), and cataracts, but with a remarkably low prevalence of heart disease, cancer, and dementia. Researchers interested in centenarians seek to understand just how this phenomenon is achieved and potentially to enable more people to achieve robust longevity. The concept of delaying aging and thereby achieving the long-desired goal of compressing morbidity is decidedly attractive—although I have long suspected that the reason centenarians do not seem to experience a prolonged, albeit late-onset period of gradual organ failure is not that they stay healthy until some breaking point and then fall apart all at once. Rather, I imagine, what happens is that the 80-year-old who gets cancer or heart disease is treated aggressively, allowing that individual to survive long enough to develop other medical problems, which are also vigorously treated, and so forth. The 100-year-old who gets cancer or heart disease, by contrast, is treated palliatively and dies without the opportunity to come down with a second or third or fourth disease. But that’s mere speculation. 

My larger point about centenarians is that studying them as a group for their exceptionalism is all well and good, but we should not forget that the group is made up of individuals. And each of those individuals, like Allan Karlsson in the Jonasson books, is deserving of respect and acceptance as a person. It certainly helps that Karlsson exhibits a rare degree of integrity, good judgment, and cleverness. To be sure, he gets into the most implausible of scrapes—such as when he and his sidekick are rescued by a North Korean ship after their hot air balloon (which they used to leave Bali without being restrained by the resort owner to whom they owed thousands of dollars) fell into the Pacific—but his ingenuity in removing 8 pounds of uranium from the possession of Kim Jong-Un is delightful. He manages to get to the US and plans to hand over the radioactive material to Donald Trump, but thinks better of it after he meets Trump, commenting that “he [Trump] was about to explode even without any blueprints for how it should be done.” Hence, Karlsson explained, he and his friend were “wondering if we might find terminal storage for the documentation in safer hands.”

While not exactly brilliant satire, The Accidental Further Adventures gives us an opportunity to see how western Europeans, in particular Swedes, see figures such as Trump, Putin, and Merkel. It’s an amusing romp and its now 101-year-old protagonist makes an enchanting hero.