The Prophet and the Idiot - Jonas Jonasson

 Good evening.

Tonight, we’re exploring The Prophet and the Idiot, a recent novel by the internationally acclaimed Swedish author Jonas Jonasson. You may recognize his name from his breakout success The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. That novel became an international sensation, translated into more than forty languages and adapted into a film. Jonasson has since become known around the world for a very particular kind of storytelling — witty, sharp, warm, and deeply human. Before turning to fiction, he worked as a journalist and media consultant, which helped him develop a keen eye for the way societies work and how people respond to change. That sharp, observant voice runs through everything he writes.

The Prophet and the Idiot, published in English in 2023, is a wonderful example of his signature style. The novel brings together three unlikely companions on an unforgettable journey. First, there’s Petra, a scientist who is absolutely convinced that the world is going to end on September twenty-first. Then there’s Johan, known as “the Prophet,” who insists that he received this date directly from God. And finally, Agnes, a seventy-five-year-old widow who lives an entirely different life online, pretending to be a young influencer. Faced with the supposed end of the world, the three set out together in a camper van, driving across Europe on an unusual road trip.

What makes this novel stand out is how Jonasson takes what could have been a bleak premise — the end of the world — and turns it into something full of humor, humanity, and reflection. Instead of focusing on disaster, he focuses on how people live when they think their time is running out. Along the way, the trio encounter strangers, misadventures, and personal reckonings. Each character faces uncomfortable truths about who they are, who they’ve been pretending to be, and what they want from the little time they think they have left.

Jonasson’s writing is fast-paced, filled with dry humor and unexpected turns. His characters are eccentric but believable, and their banter carries much of the story’s charm. But beneath that humor is a thoughtful exploration of belief, identity, fear, and the surprising ways people find connection when life is uncertain.

Critics have praised the book for being both accessible and intelligent. It doesn’t require heavy reflection to enjoy, but if you want to read deeper, it offers plenty of insight. It’s also refreshingly clean compared to much of contemporary fiction — relying on wit and situational comedy rather than shock value.

Jonasson has built a career on reminding us that life is unpredictable, people are strange, and laughter is often the best way to face what we can’t control. The Prophet and the Idiot is no exception. It’s a story that entertains while gently asking: if you knew the world would end tomorrow, how would you choose to live today?

Thank you.

Reading I

When this tale begins, Barack Obama was president of the United States,

Ban Ki-moon headed up the United Nations and Angela Merkel had ten

years left of what was already a six-year stint as chancellor of Germany.

Russia had a president whose name hardly anyone remembered. Yet

everyone knew it was Acting Prime Minister Putin who ruled there.

The Arab Spring swept across northern Africa, led by hundreds of

thousands of people who were sick of corruption and sham democracy –

and who had convinced themselves change was possible.

An earthquake in the Pacific Ocean caused a wave as tall as a five-storey

building to crash upon the coast of Japan, destroying everything in its path,

including the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Azerbaijan won the Eurovision Song Contest in front of a few hundred

million viewers. But those numbers were nothing compared to the two

billion who had, only a short time earlier, tuned in for the wedding of

England’s Prince William to Kate Middleton. All while the United States

found and shot Osama bin Laden without any viewers at all.

The age-old border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia flared up

that year, and faded again temporarily. Running the show in Sweden was

Prime Minister Reinfeldt, the leader of the conservative Moderate Party. He

was the man who made the left’s most prized issues his own and, in doing

so, won two elections in a row.

In that same country, a half-stupid little brother named Johan suddenly

found himself on his own when his older brother Fredrik jetted off to Rome

to make a diplomat of himself. Their mother had been dead for years, while

their father walked along the shores of Montevideo, hand in hand with his

boyfriend.

We’ll begin our tale with the half-stupid man. But it won’t be long before

the whole world is along for the ride. Including Obama, Ban Ki-moon and

Putin’s Russia.

Bon appetit!

Reading II

Son of a Sugar Beet Farmer

PART 1 OF 5

While three Swedes and a Dane were eating pizza with Russian caviar at an

industrial park in central Germany, a Russian named Aleksandr Kovalchuk

was pouring himself a tumbler fullof vodka in another part of the world. He

did this on occasion, after a long day.

Soon enough, fate would cause him to collide with Agnes, Johan and

Petra, but it would not do Aleksandr (or anyone else) any good to know this

as he sat on the vast terrace of the palace under a starry sky, with a cool

breeze blowing in from the sea. He told the servants to go to bed. He

preferred to enjoy these quiet nighttime moments on his own.

Aleksandr had been born fifty-five years earlier into very different

circumstances. His father and mother toiled as sugar beet farmers in a poor

and remote part of the Soviet countryside. The years after the Great

Patriotic War had not been kind to anyone. If it wasn’t raining too much, it

was raining too little. The soil cracked, the wells ran dry. It was impossible

to reach the levels of productivity set by the Soviet Council of Ministers’

State Planning Committee from their offices twelve hundred kilometres

away. The fact that Stalin had two of the seven members of the Council of

Ministers executed in order to light a fire under the remaining members

resulted in nothing more than those members’ terror-stricken decree, in

their next five-year plan, that the weather would be 60 per cent better.

Aleksandr hadn’t even been born yet when his parents abandoned their

life in the countryside. They moved to the metropolis of Sevastopol, where

their immediate survival wouldn’t be decided by better or worse weather.

With their move came a change of luck. Aleksandr’s father started

hanging out with young men who were courageous enough to speak ill of

Stalin behind closed doors. One of them was a childhood friend from his

years in Privolnoye. His name was Mikhail Sergeyevich, although no one

ever called him anything but Misha, and he had been popular in the village

because he owned an old tyre they could play with.

Mikhail Sergeyevich helped himself like no other. He joined the

Communist Party. He made a career for himself in the youth association. He

took up a position in the reasonably corrupt world of Sevastopol politics.

He led secret conversation groups in various basements with no witnesses

aside from the many rats who had, until that point, got to keep the

underworld to themselves.

Before he continued his career in Moscow, he organized a job for

Aleksandr’s father, putting him in charge of keeping all of Sevastopol clean.

Childhood friends had to stick together. Aleksandr’s father thanked him by

handing over a brand-new car tyre tied with a big red bow, saying that now

Misha would have something to play with during the many lonely nights to

come, in the capital city.

Future president Aleksandr Kovalchuk learned to walk, matured,

changed from teenager to adult. All while his father kept Sevastopol as

clean as he could around that portion of its inhabitants he could make use

of. He went from stooping over a hopeless field of sugar beets to looming

large as a powerhouse in Sevastopol. And he wanted nothing more than for

his first-born son to take another step in the same direction. Accordingly, he

forced upon his son philosophy tracts and political pamphlets in French.

The general consensus in the basement conversation circles was that it was

only a matter of time before the French communists took over central

Europe, and then they would need bridge-builders between Stalin in

Moscow and the new leadership in Paris. Aleksandr’s father thought his son

should find a place for himself in all of this.

Aleksandr read, paged through a turn-of-the-century dictionary,

understood at best half of what he was reading, read a little more,

understood more – and came to the conclusion that the French Stalinists

were as bonkers as Stalin himself. But French was lovely, in contrast to the

slurring English he also practised. Why create a whole language around the

fundamental idea of never pronouncing the letter R properly?

His father’s childhood friend Misha, meanwhile, joined the ranks of the

anti-Stalinists even above ground, without rats. This was made possible

now that Stalin had had the good sense to die.

Mikhail Sergeyevich’s family name was Gorbachev, and he made such an

impression in the corridors of power that chairman Khrushchev named him

party secretary in charge of agricultural matters and thus launched him fully

into the Politburo, the youngest ever of his kind.

Future president Kovalchuk was, at this point, just twenty-some years

old, but his father gave him a genuine university diploma in economics for

his birthday (it wasn’t cheap; the dean of the school was a greedy bastard).

With his freshly purchased education and links to his father’s childhood

friend, Aleksandr took the bus all the way to Moscow and joined Mikhail

Sergeyevich’s team as an advisor. He was in charge of imports and exports

since he was the only one on staff who knew any language other than

Russian.

Apart from what he’d learned from his DIY language studies,

Aleksandr’s image of how the world worked was totally coloured by his

father’s stories of his days as a sugar beet farmer in Privolnoye, the village

whose collected assets when the family moved away had comprised eight

sugar beet hoes, twelve chickens, three horse-drawn carts minus the horses,

and an old car tyre.

His father had raised his son according to the best of his communist

knowledge. He took for granted that the ideology he’d grown up with

would be around forever. This included the fact that the rubbish-collecting

general could use his political muscle to keep the poorly organized local

gangsters pretty well under control, the people whose fortune depended on

shortages of most things in the Soviet model society.

The advice he gave his son was to keep the mafia at arm’s length.

Perhaps things would have gone better for Aleksandr in Moscow if he had

listened a little less to his father on that particular point.

For the mafia was on the offensive.

Reading III

Agnes took her job as minister of healthcare seriously. She made

improvements starting from day one, but that was no wonder. It would have

been hard to achieve worse healthcare.

After the initial shake-up, everything began to move far too slowly for

the woman who was born and raised in a village that existed at a standstill.

At least she had a reasonable budget, since the president had agreed to

refrain, temporarily, from taking portions of his self-assigned per cent of the

GDP. But the various construction projects were commencing slowly, to the

extent they’d commenced at all (it had only been a few weeks, but still).

The enterprising minister had eight medical tents set up next to the

construction sites and got the healthcare system off the ground with the help

of said tents plus some diesel-driven generators.

Life was extremely worth living, but Agnes missed her journeys with

Travelling Eklund. In the evenings, she turned to her photo-editing software

as a type of self-guided therapy. There she built the hospital she wanted to

have, integrated with a dignified care home. Out of sheer momentum she

placed schools in every valley and built a new airport and a stock exchange

building. Then she added a shopping centre and tore down the better part of

the capital city’s centre and built it anew. The cost exceeded the nation’s

total assets many times over. No point in being stingy when it was all for

pretend anyway.

Chief of Police Günther had reason to visit the presidential palace at least

three times a week, along with his daughter. That was where Pocahontas the

Pony lived, after all. While Angelika was busy with her pony and her riding

instructor, her father was happy to sit down with Agnes. He was less happy

to see the doomsday prophet, who spent day after day sitting under the

same umbrella in the garden with her numbers. Judging by the grunting and

the expression on her face, she was making progress.

‘She seems to be getting closer to the doomsday solution,’ Günther said

to Agnes.

‘I hope Judgment Day beats her to it,’ said the minister of healthcare. ‘I

can’t handle another countdown.’

‘What’s that?’ said Günther, looking at the violet-haired creative’s

renderings of everything from hospitals to airports.

Agnes told him. They could probably make these images a reality in

twenty or thirty years, if the president didn’t cling too tightly to his cash.

Which, of course, he did.

Aleko’s friend suddenly saw the light!

In just a few hours he had to deliver the final draft of the president’s

speech before the assembly. Composing it had been slow going so far. He

so wanted to make the mooning happen, but he couldn’t figure out how. At

some point the president would have to pull his trousers back up, and if not

done just right it might be interpreted as some sort of capitulation.

Enter: these fantastic fantasies from the minister of healthcare!

Altogether it was probably too much, but they could use a careful selection

of images. Günther suddenly knew how he and Aleko would cause chaos in

the assembly – again!

He immediately called his brother-in-arms-slash-the president to bring

him up to speed. Aleko saw who was calling and answered the phone with a

question.

‘Did you figure it out?’

Günther asked a question back:

‘What is the worst thing ever in the minds of at least ten of those pigs in

the assembly?’

‘AIDS?’ Aleko speculated.

‘No: free, democratic elections.’

Günther was right, of course. The progression of AIDS could be slowed

with medicine, but a presidential election without any fraud would mean the

end for quite a few of the representatives who most deserved to be messed

with. The question was, what was Günther after here? Weren’t he and

Aleko in complete agreement with those pigs, that democracy could not be

allowed to go too far?