Let's Read: A Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

A friend of mine at work loaned me this book, A Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, to read. A friend of hers had loaned it to her. I read it in February. As you saw my post yesterday my last day of work was February 28th and so I was on a timeline to complete this book. I had considered it earlier as a choice for a book with a number but wasn't really interested in purchasing. But as a reading project I thought I should try it out. There were parts of this far fetched book I enjoyed. I liked the idea that he would just get on a bus with no intended destination with a young punks suitcase in tow who had asked him to watch this suitcase while he used the washroom. That was clever. The suitcase's contents provided the plot for much of the drama that ensued. It was not as funny as I had anticipated for all the rave reviews but it was entertaining.

This past week I found myself in a confusing situation where the cloud locked me out of all my apple  functions. My password which I have been using for almost two years no longer functioned. And all my security questions were not what I thought they were. It is a little disconcerting to be certain. I was able to get back in finally but for the life of me I cannot figure out what the name of my first pet was because it should have been Charlie. Charlie was the best dog ever. And while technically she was not my pet I loved her as if she was.

Allan's loss of a pet and grief landed him in the seniors home after in a vengeful act against a fox he blew up his home. Much of the flashbacks in the book revolve around something or other that Allan blows up. He finds himself in a lot of sticky situations and meets a number of world leaders. 

Much of the book reads as a bizarre chain of circumstances. After I lost my Apple ID I was curious to find if all my credits I had recently entered from gift cards over Christmas were still there. In this process I was almost locked out once again as I was required to enter my security questions answers again but as luck would have it I received the two questions that I had finally figured out after a weeks time of trying and not the notorious pet question. And to quote this book such luck bordered on the absurd. 

I was not certain if the credit was still there because it no longer appeared below in the footer. So I decided to try it by renting a video. And that is when I discovered that there was also a film by the same name. Parts of it include subtitles as I think the film as the book were originally in Sweedish. I think I preferred the film to the book even though it did not follow the sequence of the book after the foray into Russia because it was over in one hour and fourty minutes. Terrible reasoning I know but I think in that much time one got a sense of the zany story if not the exact details. 

One aspect of the film that I did not like however was the flashbacks to middle age Allan. I liked him as a boy and an old man but the middle age version I preferred in the book as he seemed much more intelligent even if he was carefree. I would have liked to have seen the scene where he hiked the Himalayas. That's not saying I enjoyed the flashbacks in the book. I much preferred the escape and aftermath. The film version flashbacks to a middle age Allan left him bumbling along in a drunken, stupor. There was also much to much peeing in the film version.

There was a level of morbidity to the plot and it reminded me of that film where a lottery winner in a little village in some Scandinavian isle turns up deceased and his friends are to collect the prize or something like that. Please someone remind me of which film I am trying to recall. 

Don't take this quasi review as a must read from me. Have you read the book or watched the movie? What did you think?