The Invoice

May 9, 2016
Karlsson (The Room) explores the elusiveness of happiness in modern times. When a part-time clerk at Jugge’s Flicks, an art house video store in Stockholm, receives an invoice for nearly six million kroner (more than $900,000) from a mysterious bureaucratic entity called World Resources Distribution (WRD), he assumes that someone somewhere is running a scam. The absurd request—which turns out to be a tax on Experienced Happiness—triggers a series of reassessments that forces the protagonist to recall every major event in his life to determine if he is, as WRD claims, extraordinarily happy. Sure, while a student at university he experienced a life-changing and clandestine relationship with a beautiful Indian student who left him for an arranged marriage, but at first glance, his life has been uneventful. While protesting the charge, which increases even as he makes daily desperate calls to WRD., he falls for Maud Andersson, the voice on the other end of the line. Could the narrator’s own blithe acceptance of life’s foibles further complicate his situation? Karlsson’s story recalls the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka, if those two had been, well, happy. The narrator, an affable fellow at loose ends, understands his uncluttered life better than he thinks he does, and the author’s sympathetic portrayal of him, as well as the mirror his experience holds to an increasingly Byzantine and humorless society, wins the day.

May 1, 2016
A Stockholm video store clerk receives a mysterious bill for 5,700,000 kronor in a charming story that explores the relationship between money and happiness. The nameless hero of Swedish actor Karlsson's (The Room, 2015) short novel is the ultimate lovable nebbish. His simple life consists of going to work, eating takeout pizza, and looking out the window. His pleasures include old movies, ice cream, spending time with a cheapskate buddy, and revisiting treasured memories of his one great love. He is a connoisseur of even smaller diversions: "Then I came up with a new way of puffing out my cheeks and amused myself with that for a while. After that I found the remains of an old sticker that someone had stuck to the side of the counter, now just fragments that it was quite fun to pick off with my thumb and forefinger. Twenty minutes or so later, I'd almost managed to get rid of it all." When he investigates the massive invoice, he learns that a mysterious authority called W.R.D. has been empowered to levy fees against all citizens for the amount of happiness they have experienced in their lives. But how can a person who owns almost nothing, has no social life to speak of, and has passed up every opportunity for advancement owe so much, he wonders--more than anyone else! Several times more than millionaires and people "whose lives are a never-ending party." His attempt to understand the bill leads him into an extended phone relationship with one of W.R.D.'s customer support consultants and into a deeper examination of what has caused his "Experienced Happiness" quotient to achieve such heights. A fable for the ages. Should be read alongside The Trial and Nineteen Eighty-Four as an antidote.

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February 15, 2016

Talk about a deliciously absurdist situation: a movie-obsessed young man who survives modestly on pizza and a part-time job at a video store receives an invoice for 5.7 million kronor (about $663,000), owed for all he has experienced in his life. Leading Swedish actor/playwright Karlsson debuts with a novel already sold to 11 countries.

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