Drunken Review

The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
Jonas Jonasson
epub, 404kb 350 pages

The title, very clever, should have been a forewarning. A venture of far-fetched possibilities in far-flung places. It still manages to guillotine our imagination, and sure it's a pure delight to read, if only to release or escape from our own daily realities.

It often sounds like a script, a very easy read, wrapped in a desire to be adapted into the big screen. It's more readable in an ebook, as if it already anticipated that the readers will consume it in their e-readers rather than a physical book.

The last time I felt like this was Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore. Although Sloan's book was also like a propaganda, or an outright advertisement for something. For Google, in particular. The Hundred Year Old Man...., on the other hand, seems like an outright advertisement for vodka. It lured me into buying a bottle each of British and Russian vodka. The Swedish ones are overpriced.

In Filipino, we have a concept called usapang lasing, "drunken-talk." The boastful stories armed with expletives, the claims of achievement, the inner secrets or verified gossips that only reveals itself when one is drunk. This book is just like that. A lot of often-fun drunken talk.