Happy
An imaginative and innovative debut novel - 'An essential novel' Telegraph
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
'This novel is genius . . . strange and superb . . . radiant and exhilarating' THE TELEGRAPH
'A magnificent attempt to help us understand the mixture of optimism, self-defense, hope and delusion[needed] to make the monumental choice of whether or not to leave home' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
' A sobering reminder' WASHINGTON POST
'Leaping, chattering, dancing atop this conundrum [of global migration] comes the hero of Celina Baljeet Basra's debut novel, Happy Singh Soni, his head bursting with ideas, his heart set on gargantuan dreams' NEW YORK TIMES
A starry-eyed young cinephile leaves his rural village in India with big dreams, only to find himself trapped in menial jobs and forced to work off a debt he may never repay.
In a small farming village in Punjab, India, a boy crouches over his brother's phone in a rapeseed field watching clips of Godard's Bande à part on YouTube.
His name is Happy Singh Soni and when he's not sleeping among the cabbages and eating sugary rotis, Happy dreams of becoming an actor, one who plays the melancholy roles; the sad, pretty boys, rare in Indian cinema. He plans a clandestine journey to Europe, where he'll finally land a breakout role.
After a nightmarish passage to Italy, Happy still manages to find relief in food and fantasy, even as he is forced into ever-worsening work conditions on a radish farm by the syndicate involved in smuggling him to Europe to pay off the supposed debt they claim he has accrued. While disillusionment amongst the farm workers rise, Happy will find the love - and tragedy - that his favourite films always promised.
At turns funny and heart-breaking, sunny and tragic, Happy is a formally ambitious novel about the psychic fissures produced by the splintering of nations, and the lovely, generative, artful coping mechanisms created by generations of diasporic people. With this ingenious, daringly cinematic debut, Celina Baljeet Basra argues for the things that are basic to human survival: food, water, shelter, but also pleasure, romance, art, and the right to a vivid inner life.
More praise for HAPPY:
'A MIRACULOUS NOVEL' MEGHA MAJUMDAR
'PLAYFUL AND PROFOUND . . . USING WRY HUMOUR TO DELIVER A DEAD SERIOUS MESSAGE' MELISSA FU
'A BONKERS STORY THAT READS LIKE A FINE TEN-COURSE MEAL' GARY SHTEYNGART
'A FANTASTIC LITTLE GEM OF A BOOK' CHIKODILI EMELUMADU
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Basra's formally inventive debut traces a young Punjab man's hopeful and disenchanting migration from India to Europe. The youngest of four children, Happy Singh was given by his aspirational Sikh parents "the most international name they knew." The agricultural economy of their small village in Punjab is decimated by the arrival of Wonderland, a derivative amusement park where Happy, formerly a cabbage farmer, gets a dead-end job, dreaming all the while of a better life—and perhaps a film career inspired by his beloved Jean-Luc Godard. Happy saves enough money to secure a clandestine passage to Italy, where he discovers he's thousands of euros in debt to his "coordinators" and unable to gain legal working papers or to return home. With no other options, he finds work on a radish farm. As optimistic as he is naive, Happy endures in no small part due to his rich (and sometimes raunchy) imaginative inner life. Revealed in short snippets of imagined dialogue and interspersed with the perspectives of other characters and even inanimate objects, Happy's view of the world starts off as quirky and charming, but gains increasing pathos as the divide between his starry-eyed hopes and his increasingly hopeless reality grows. Happy's singular voice echoes long after the close to this striking story.
