After a long career as a journalist, media consultant and television producer, Jonas Jonasson decided to start a new life. After the main characters had been introduced, it was a lot less funny, albeit not without the odd laugh. From the author of the international bestseller The 100-Year-Old-Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared , a brilliant satirical novel set in modern Sweden--a story of idealism and fanaticism, gangsters and entrepreneurs, sensationalism and spirituality, that explores the values that matter in contemporary life.

The story is a commentary on the violence of modern life, from the psychological violence of growing up with an alcoholic parent who rejects you and sets the benchmark for your misanthropy to the actual violence of being an alcoholic pill popper whose tendency to violence while under the influence leads you to become a hitman. e clar ca fiind pe placul meu, am numai cuvinte de laudă la adresa ei, asa ca nu voi mai zice nimic si voi lasa pe fiecare sa descopere "lumea pe înțelesul tuturor". The cover describes the three as “likeable characters pushed into absurd situations”, but in fact only the rather unintelligent hitman fits this description.is a briskly-paced, occasionally bizarre, often hilarious story, with unusually intelligent, though morally questionable protagonists, somewhat less intelligent, bungling antagonists, death, mayhem, oblivious authorities, lashings of karma, and an oddly recurring theme of a briefcase (or two) full of cash. Now he is fresh out of prison yet again, he decides to stay away from the hard stuff so he won't end up right back inside. They even learn to be more environmentally friendly, as well as more frugal and less grasping without practical justification. Initially unnoticed by them, Hitman Anders embarks on an existential crisis that plays out in early morning drinking and unreasonable violence towards inanimate objects. the orginal title of the book is Hitman Anders and His Friends, but I must say i like the translation title better, and i like the translation as much as i like Johansson's way of narrating everything, it is so objectively subjective, so pleasantly familiar ans surprising, so overwhelmingly simple, and so elaborately complicated.

While no author should just keep doing the same thing over and over again, to me this tale felt too far removed from Jonasson's previous style to have me falling in love with the characters. Mischievous yet big-hearted, filled with Jonas Jonasson's trenchant humor and delightful twists, Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All is a delightful comic adventure that reminds us it's never to late to start over--and to discover what truly matters.He became a media consultant and later set up a company producing sports and events for Swedish television, before selling his company and moving abroad to work on his first novel. Using the media's obsessive need for sensational, headline-making stories to advertise their talent's superb "skill," they quickly build a clientele of rich Swedish gangsters. While it starts well, and Jonasson’s third novel is perhaps a slight improvement on the second, the formula of zany characters in absurd situations has worn rather thin. In an ironic aside in Chapter 57, the narrator acknowledges this lack of plot progression when he comments, "In some sense, one could say that they [the two main characters] were back in the vicinity of Chapter 16 of this story," but making a joke about this absence of forward progression doesn't make it ok. He takes a room at the Sea Point Hotel where the receptionist, Per Persson avoids contact with the world, which has not treated him too well so far.