Old and frail was yesterday - today active seniors dominate their own book section
The Swedish journalist and author Jonas Jonasson has created a bestseller with his novel "The Centenarian Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared". By June 2014, the book had sold more than six million copies worldwide - and been translated into 35 languages. The protagonist Allan Karlsson in a nursing home climbs out of the window out of weariness about the planned big celebration of his 100th birthday and flees to Bali with a suitcase full of money after a murder of a young drug dealer and chases with the police. Along the way, his life story is also told, a life story that touches on many events of political world affairs through many surprising coincidences.
Now Allan Karlsson has returned in the novel "The Centenarian Who Came Back to Save the World". The protagonist Karlsson has had enough of a permanent holiday in Bali and ends up on a ship belonging to North Korean President Kim Jong Un, who is once again flexing his muscles in the nuclear dispute with South Korea. Of course, he also meets US President Donald Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel - with unexpected consequences, of course!
Elderly protagonists in literature
The image of elderly protagonists in literature has changed considerably. Jonas Jonasson's work about the centenarian shows this. It presents in a breathtaking and bizarre way what old people can tell us. Anyone who has ever spoken to older people knows about the wealth of experience they have in their long lives. Old and aged people as protagonists in literature? This is not a new topic - but literature is a mirror for the spirit of the times, and it increasingly focuses on older and more experienced people because they have exciting stories to tell or have thought deeply about human existence. In doing so, they are anything but uncool. Quite the opposite! They show many a youngster and young-at-heart midlife crisis-ridden hipster what is possible in a single life. And there is probably no one in Germany who does not know older people who lived through the Second World War or the system of the former GDR.
Criticism of the new role of seniors in literature
The weekly DIE ZEIT even describes the funny senior citizen novel as a new literary entertainment genre and says that this trend emerged around 2009, precisely when the centenarian caused such a furore and countered negative literature about the care crisis and people on the sidelines with something humorous. However, she also criticises that this new genre has something discriminatory about it, as it sometimes portrays senior citizens in a somewhat dimwitted way and creates improbable and flat jokes based on schoolboy pranks. The criticism in the original: "The strange thing about the genre of the senior citizen novel is that it is based on the model of the youth novel. That's why the funniness with which the 70-plus age group is provided is usually on the level of schoolboy pranks. And this is where things get awkward. This pseudo-youthful fun not only has a silly edge, it also has something discriminatory about it."
The magazine DER SPIEGEL jumps into the same breach in an article on the same topic. It criticises the flat jokes and whitewashing of the new literature on old age: "Something is so obviously being whitewashed here that even those who have never been afraid of old age must become sceptical. In truth, everything seems much worse than one thought. Virginia Ironside's undercurrent of cheerfulness and positivity is reminiscent of a very amateurish brainwashing - you have to be unhappy to appreciate the comfort of such a clumsy work of encouragement - we are talking about the novel "No! I'm not going to the senior citizens' meeting!" But there is literature that gets better marks such as Jane Miller's "The Magic Years". Unlike Virginia Ironside, Miller is open about her own age (she was born in 1932). She has succeeded in writing an honest and well thought-out book, "lively and exciting, as real life can be when an author sets the right priorities in her description". The work humorously describes developments such as her completely extinguished interest in her own sexuality, reflections on the end of life, and emails offering her penis enlargements. She quotes the Russian writer Turgenev: "Is an old thing, death, and yet new to everyone." Spiegel verdict: "This may be more serious than most of what other books have to say about old age - in its serenity it is more comforting than any stale joke."
How it was before: Famous older protagonists in world literature
The image of old age in literature has changed a lot. A look at the classics shows this. For his last work, the novel "The Old Man and the Sea", Ernest Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the highest award in literature. Also famous are wise old men, wizards, like Merlin or Gandalf, but all of them at least in their 8th year of life and thus unattainable and utopian. Figures like Papa Smurf or the widow Bolte from Wilhelm Busch's "Max and Moritz" are also aged. Unlike the modern protagonists, however, they seem rather frail and old, weak and scarred by life. Quite different from modern literature, in which the protagonists reach retirement age or have long since passed it and are described as rebels against the system.
What makes seniors so interesting for authors
Senior citizens have an exceedingly comic potential. That's what makes them so interesting for authors. They can be maddeningly annoying or they can be a lifesaver because they radiate calm and experience. They can be silver surfers or die-hards, they can spill their guts on any occasion, no matter how inappropriate, or they can be mysterious silencers. Their lives may have made them wise, sapient or embittered to the point of stubbornness. Old people have a great potential for conflict, have made their experiences in a foreign time and thus question the younger characters. But above all, they also have their weaknesses. From ailments to tangible physical limitations or even mental quirks. For example, a professor with dementia in the book "The Professor" (John Katzenbach) has to fight - against forgetting and for people to believe that he witnessed a murder.
However, frailty need not only be a disadvantage. Being underestimated becomes an enormous advantage, for example in the book about the "Centenarian who climbed out of the window and disappeared". In "Pirates of the Night", an eleven-year-old plagued by nightmares finds out that his grandmother has magical powers. In "Night Train to Lisbon", an elderly teacher simply gets out of his ever-same life and spontaneously travels to Lisbon - a mind-blowing story.
Much more than just slapstick
That literature has much more to offer than just slapstick with senior citizens is shown by many other titles, such as "The End is My Beginning" (Tiziano Terzani), in which a father and son talk about the great journey of life, or in "Life Verbatim", in which Jakob Augstein talks to his father Martin Walser about a father-son relationship that was never lived and the reasons for it. Blurb: "You are my father. - A circumstance that fills me with joy. - When I was a child, I didn't know that. And maybe you didn't either. I was almost forty when we first met, you almost eighty years old. - Yes, Jakob, we were both too old." These are stories of silence and uncovering, of well-kept secrets and great feelings that arouse curiosity and appeal to the heart. Unlike love stories and Hollywood productions, the story does not end with the dream wedding, it tells of the decades after and the awareness of the finiteness of life. They are always great stories when old protagonists are involved. It makes you want more, provided the authors take the quite understandable criticisms to heart.
