Read The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared for Free Online

interest in trying to change them.
    In a political sense, Allan’s childhood had been bewildering. On the one hand, he was from the working class. You could hardly use any other description of a boy who ends his schooling when he is ten to get a job in industry. On the other hand, he respected the memory of his father, and his father during far too short a life had managed to hold views right across the spectrum . He started on the Left, went on to praise Tsar Nicholas II and rounded off his existence with a land dispute with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
    His mother, in between her coughing fits, had cursed everyone from the King to the Bolsheviks and, in passing, even the leader of the Social Democrats, Mr Wholesale Merchant Gustavsson, and – not least – Allan’s father.
    Allan himself was certainly no fool. True, he only spent three years in school, but that was plenty for him to have learned to read, write and count. His politically conscious fellow workers at Nitroglycerine Ltd. had also made him curious about the world.
    But what finally formed young Allan’s philosophy of life were his mother’s words when they received the news of his father’s death. It took a while before the message seeped into his soul, but once there, it was there for ever:
    Things are what they are, and whatever will be will be.
    That meant among other things that you didn’t make a fuss, especially when there was good reason to do so, as for example, when they heard the news about his father’s death. In accordance with family tradition, Allan reacted by chopping wood, although for an unusually long time and particularly quietly. Or when his mother followed his father’s example, and as a result was carried out to the waiting hearse. Allan stayed in thekitchen and followed the spectacle through the window. And then he said so quietly that only he could hear:
    ‘Well, goodbye, mum.’
    And that was the end of that chapter of his life.
     
    Allan worked hard with his dynamite company and during the first years of the 1920s built up a considerable circle of customers in the county. On Saturday evenings, when his contemporaries were attending barn dances, Allan sat at home and developed new formulae to improve the quality of his dynamite . And when Sunday came, he went to the gravel pit and tested the new explosives. But not between eleven and one, he had finally had to promise the local pastor, in exchange for him not complaining too much about Allan’s absence from church.
    Allan liked his own company and that was good, because he lived a solitary life. Since he didn’t join the ranks of the labour movement he was despised by socialists, while he was far too working class (not to mention being his father’s son) to be allowed a place at any bourgeois gathering. Gustavsson, for one, would rather die than end up in the company of that Karlsson brat. Just think, what would happen if the boy discovered what Gustavsson had been paid for the enamel egg which he had once bought from Allan’s mother for next to nothing and now sold to a diplomat in Stockholm. Thanks to that bit of business, Gustavsson had become the district’s third proud owner of an automobile.
    That time he had been lucky. But one Sunday in August 1925, after the church service, Gustavsson’s luck ran out. He went out for a drive, mainly to show off his expensive car. Unluckily for him, he happened to choose the road that passed Allan Karlsson’s house. At the bend, Gustavsson had got nervous (or perhaps God or fate had a hand in the events), and the gears got stuck and one thing led to another and Gustavsson and hisautomobile went straight into the gravel pit behind the house, instead of following the gentle curve of the road to the right. It would have been bad enough for Gustavsson to set foot on Allan’s land and have to explain himself, but things turned out much worse than that, because just as Gustavsson managed to bring his runaway automobile to a halt, Allan set