More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 15 - July 25, 2018
Allan really couldn’t say why he did it. When life has gone into overtime it’s easy to take liberties, he thought, and he made himself comfortable in the seat.
—Are you really one hundred years old? he asked. In that case, you must be hungry. Allan couldn’t follow the logic, but of course he was hungry.
When he was there he often met young men who were keen to debate and who all had one thing in common: they wanted to tempt Allan into some political movement or other. But Allan’s great interest in world events did not include any interest in trying to change them.
What a great sentence, that last one! The funny thing is: he did change them!
And Benny continued like this for thirty years, until the extremely aged lawyer one day contacted him and announced that the money in the will was now used up, that there wouldn’t be any more monthly allowances, and of course there was no other money available for anything else. The brothers could forget the inheritance, said the lawyer who was now more than ninety years old and who appeared to have stayed alive for the sake of the will, because just a couple of weeks later he died in his television armchair.
He couldn’t remember everything, he said, but you can cover a lot if you sit at a school desk for three decades, and do your homework once in a while.
But since the daughter spoke nothing other than a monotonous-sounding Tibeto-Burmese dialect that Allan didn’t understand, he thought that where intellectual stimulation was concerned he could just as well talk to the camel.
Oil provided fantastic wealth to both England and Iran. Mainly England, if the truth be told, but that was only fair because Iran’s sole contribution to the project was cheap labor—and of course the oil itself.
Chief Inspector Aronsson felt a little disappointed at the way things had developed. It would have been much more fun to save a geriatric from the clutches of a gang of criminals, rather than—as now—failing to save the criminals from the geriatric.
—So a bottle of vodka would solve the Israel-Palestine conflict? asked Bosse. That stretches all the way back to the Bible. —For the particular conflict you mention, it is not impossible that you would need more than one bottle, Allan answered. But the principle is the same.
Herbert’s mother got a decent sum of money from Papa Einstein. Supposedly she then met a genuine count who persuaded her to invest all her money in his almost-finished machine for the production of a life elixir that cured every existing illness. But then the count had disappeared, and he must have taken the elixir with him because Herbert’s impoverished mama died some years later, of tuberculosis.
—Escape? said Herbert Einstein. Over land? To South Korea? Via North Korea? —More or less, said Allan. At least that’s the working plan. —The chances that we will survive can’t be more than microscopic, said Herbert. —You’re probably right about that, said Allan. —I’m in! said Herbert.
