This book was fucking terrible.  The writing was fine, but the story was boring, racist, misogynist, and not at all funny.

It’s basically the story of a 100 year old man who escapes from his nursing home and ends up on a wild adventure after stealing a suitcase filled with money.  Throughout the book it looks back over his 100 year life, where he basically flounced around not giving a shit about anything or anyone and somehow being a part of every significant world political event (a la Forest Gump).

Throughout the entire book there are only 4 female characters, one of which is the horribly nasty woman who runs the nursing home, one is a communist who is threatened with SA for being a communist, and the other two aren’t even called by the actual names.  Like, what the actual fuck?  

The author repeatedly uses cringy terms for non-white folks, as well as stereotypes as a way to be funny.  For example, when our 100 year old man first leaves Sweden in his 20s, he’s excited to see a the-outdated-N-word-not-the-really-bad-N-word (which I’m still not going to type), but then he saw one and he didn’t need to see more.  This is the incredibly racist view that folks of other ethnicities all look the same, so if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.  The 100 year old man visits many countries over his life and any non-western countries are portrayed as being unintelligent and backward.  I don’t know if it’s worse if this author did this intentionally to be funny (which it’s not), or if he legitimately didn’t realize what he was doing…. There are also instances of Islamophobia, which have zero impact on the plot of the book, so could easily have been left out, yet the author chose to write it in there anyway.

Overall, terrible book that I never would have read, and certainly never would have finished if it wasn’t for the book club that I run at work…