The Girl Who Saved The King Of Sweden
by
Jonas Jonasson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a book with a long title and when judging the book by its cover, seems like a silly little book that may be entertaining.
And that it most definitely is – but is it anything more?
The premise is simple enough, it follows the life and times of a girl named Nombeko Mayeki who lives in the bowels of Sowetta, South Africa. It follows her attempts to better her life and to find meaning and to make something of herself and that in the face of adversity, challenges, drunken drivers, spies, idiots and more.
Recommended by a friend who (as it happens) now lives in Sweden, this was a book I thought interesting because that first line as you see in the preceding chapter, sounds like the start of either a feel-good character journey or an exploration of a hard life – but then you get to the rest of the descriptive line and you see that there’s definitely something less than serious in the offing here and that is actually quite apt.
Jonasson has done something quite remarkable here in that he’s told a very good story that engages from the earliest pages til the last and he’s done an impeccable job balancing realism with the absurd and dramatic situations with comedic style in a way I’m not used to seeing. It’s not every author who can talk about a young girl in a slum and how she protects herself from a would-be molester with scissors and then makes him work FOR her and somehow make it all genuinely humorous without being slapstick or outrightly silly – and it’s not even really a tale filled with dark humour which makes it all the more striking!
What’s the most striking though is that even when there should be a moment of tension (like a stand-off with the Swedish military or being hunted by Mossad agents), somehow it never feels like a spike of adrenalin, it’s always got a sense of calm and perhaps just a hint of humour and melancholy. In a way, the best way I can describe it is that this book is like a Volvo (another product of Sweden) in that it is simple and unassuming and you don’t expect much but the more you spend time with it, you can’t help but appreciate and enjoy the way it’s all put together and the experience of driving around in it. (Except that Volvo’s don’t come equipped with spies, nuclear bombs and idiots galore, thankfully!)
What makes the story itself all the more compelling is that midst all the absurd and at times downright silly moments that occur in terribly serious situations, is the fact that the author also manages to craft characters that are, outside of Nombeko and Holger-Two, not really very deep or multi-faceted and yet they are all sufficiently fleshed out for their intended purpose and the dynamics and chemistry between the characters is exactly what it needs to be for the sake of the story. There is (some) growth in the rest and a fair bit for our protagonist(s) and this journey of Nombeko from childhood to adulthood over a couple of decades as she contends with a variety of fascinating characters is a highly entertaining experience to say the least – I myself ended up reading this book during extra carved out reading time over 3 days.
I really enjoyed how it all meanders and fumbles and flows and the poor girl/womans journey is almost Sisyphus-ian and during it all her tenacity, wit and spirit are remarkable! The events of the story kept unfolding and every time something would happen and I would shake my head and yet somehow it all worked out and was never over-wrought, even when it perhaps should have felt so, and by the end it all came together almost as if it was so meant to be the whole time.
There are moments where you want to burst out laughing, others where you really feel for the characters and a whole slew of unexpected reactions to what, as I said, seems at it’s core to be a comedic and silly little story but shows that whatever its parts, the sum is greater.
All in all, this is one of those books I was genuinely glad to have read and I loved every page. And while it could be compared to many a comedic writer, I rarely find a story (even in non-written mediums) that is so well balanced and enjoyable.
—– X —–
One Happy Monk 
Leave a comment