Happy Are the Happy
A Novel
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The internationally acclaimed playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza stages a band of eighteen characters at war with their lives, with only humor to sustain them
Happy are the loved ones and the lovers and those who can do without love. Happy are the happy. —Jorge Luis Borges
Schnitzler’s La Ronde gives these twenty short chapters their shape while Borges’s poem gives them their content. As we move from story to story, thrilled to reconnect with an old acquaintance from an earlier scene, we can’t help but admit that we are very much at home in this human comedy that understands all too well the passing thoughts, desires, actions, fears, and mistakes that we have and make day after day, but that we would be incapable of rendering with such acuity and compassion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Playwright and author Reza's newest book is a fragmented novella of vignettes, all of which function as independent short stories. Reza follows more than a dozen characters struggling with marriage and loneliness opening with "Robert Toscano," a hilarious study of patience and insistence revolving around a married couple in France, the Toscanos, who get into an escalating argument over cheese (he doesn't buy the kind she likes). Reza's askew humor pervades the book four chapters later, we find out that the seemingly perfect Hunter family (bitterly envied by the Toscanos) has a secret: the son is not interning abroad, he is in a mental institution because he believes he is Celine Dion. Reza's vignettes are also dark (a man's incestuous relationship with his brother later turns him into a sexual masochist) and sardonic (a man accuses his wife of wanting to be buried together for social reasons: "My wife is counting on the grave to outfox spiteful gossips, she wants to remain a petit bourgeois even in death"). Reza's stories build and build, creating a complicated, multifaceted world a world that is unmistakably Reza's.
