Shelf Indulgence – “The girl who saved the king of Sweden”
To say it with the words of Yoda:
Bad morning it is not. 🌿
Fellow moon children, how are you feeling? Did you had a chance to bathe in the lovely Flower Full Moon last night? Do you feel charged up by its super power? 🌝
Just like the clouds in the sky last night, the week has flown by (again!), and it is Friday (yippiehh!). As some of you know, this day is very dear to me 🍕, and thus, the time has come to share more of what I truly love: Books! Reading can cure, help to heal, and inspire, and today we start with the first of many reviews to come. Enjoy! 🤓
“The girl who saved the king of Sweden” by Jonas Jonasson
We Germans love to be world champions. We are proud to engineer the world's best cars, to brew the globe's yummiest beers, and to deliver the most durable screws. However, there is one area in which we top all international charts, but we’d rather not talk about it: we are the undisputed leaders in neighbourly fights.
Yes, you read right, statistically speaking, we Germans do hate our neighbours. 🙈
29% of the approximately 40 million German households have war-like relationships with the people next door, and every third adult has already had a fallout so serious that police had to be called to the 'scene of crime' (in most cases, the garden fence). We Germans like our lives quiet, strictly organized, and without any disturbances, which makes toilet flushing after midnight, screaming children, or loud moaning during sex the most popular reasons my compatriots go to court these days.
Luckily, I live in Goa, and having lived for more than a decade in India has made me immune to noise and chaos. Not that I need it - our neighbors are amazing! They don’t make us angry, they simply make us fat. 😅 A flourishing door-to-door food-exchange has started since we moved; and now, that we have reached the level of comfort that allows Punjabi-style cholas to be traded against pureed potato soup, our relationship has reached a new height: the exchange of books. This is how Jonas Jonasson's bestseller "The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden" came into my life, accompanied by Krautsalad in Tupperware. Oh, how can one not admire life's wondrous twists and turns!
Analfabeten som kunde räkna*
And as phenomenal as life can be, so also is the plot of this book. Nombeko Mayeki, orphan, prodigy mathematic, and South African toilet cleaner, ends up with an unaccounted three-megaton atomic bomb (and a pocket full of diamonds) in Sweden, entangles with the Israeli intelligence agency (in exchange for antelope meat), an alcoholic engineer, three Chinese sisters, and twins named Holger One and Holger Two, who are officially one person, pursuing their inherited ambition to overthrow the king of Sweden. Sounds hilarious? Because it is!
Jonasson has managed to deliver another literary hit after his chart-topper "The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared", maintaining his entertaining feel-good-writing style. One cannot but sympathize with his characters; these charming, gutsy underdogs, who bravely fight their way through life's obstacles. They make the reader feel that everything, literally everything is possible, even if "the statistical probability that an illiterate in 1970's Soweto will grow up, and one day find herself confined in a potato truck with the Swedish king and prime minister is 1 in 45,766,212,810". What more do you want from a book?
I wish you’ll have a fully ‘booked out’weekend. 📚
"The Girl Who Saved the King Of Sweden" is therefore not only a perfect picaresque fantasy, but also a great holiday read, appropriate for lazy weekends on the couch. Jonasson's fast paced storytelling equilibrates the hangover from the night before, and his unique skill, the mixing of real-life-facts and -personalities with fictional, almost surreal characters, makes you giggle out loud more than once. Personally, the 420 pages could have been a bit more tighter; but hey, each chapter ends with a cliff-hanger-moment that results in wanting to read "only one more", and therefore made it impossible to put it down. No wonder that the book is currently adapted into a movie!
Apart for waiting for the film's release, I need to find the perfect return book to give to my new next-door-friend. And since the Greek poet Hesiod said: "A bad neighbor is a misfortune as much as a good neighbor is a blessing", we better evolve our relationship on Indian, and not German, terms – and thus, every book choice counts. 🙏
With love from Goa,
Isabelle 🌿
*Swedish original title of the book
