Happiness Forever
A Novel
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- 12,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
A complete refreshment and uplift of energy: a hilarious, beguiling first novel for the head and the heart.
Sylvie is happy only when she’s in therapy. This is because Sylvie is in love with her therapist; she thinks about her every second they’re not together (roughly 167 hours and 10 minutes per week). In that room, Sylvie is able to talk about everything: the false hope promised by eighties music; what a dog’s inner life is really like; and how sad she, Sylvie is, outside that room. She’s aware she has an obsession, but whether it’s some flavor of erotic transference or a lost person’s need to connect, Sylvie isn’t sure.
Outside therapy Sylvie has what she considers to be a small life: a job as a veterinary nurse, companionship from her tattoo artist friend via text, and seaside walks with her brain-damaged dog, Curtains. But maybe therapy is making a difference, inviting her to imagine possibilities—possibilities that include a new friend she meets on the beach.
When the therapist starts to prepare Sylvie for the terrible fact that all treatment has to come to an end, Sylvie can’t stop herself from imagining sleeping in her car parked outside the therapist’s house. That won’t work. She has to be brave. Be brave, Sylvie! We love you.
In this wonderful, hilarious, stunning debut, Adelaide Faith captures the vulnerability, difficulty, and joy of personhood, of being a person, of being alive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Faith's witty and irreverent debut, a British woman develops an unshakable obsession with her therapist. Sylvie, a veterinarian nurse, scrolled through 23 pages of therapists before choosing the "only one... who didn't strike her as too annoying to talk to." After a few sessions, Sylvia spots her unnamed therapist on the street while the two women are out walking their dogs, and she's overcome with desire for the therapist's love and approval ("She felt she might be saved.... There was a sense that a great freedom was close"). Instead of greeting her therapist, though, she picks up her dog and runs away. As the sessions unfold, the reader learns Sylvia has a history of fixations on unattainable people, such as a crime writer whose attention she sought by presenting him with a drawing of his dog. In the third act, the therapist delivers upsetting news, prompting Sylvie to search for the strength to rely on herself. Faith's razor-sharp prose and Sylvie's fanciful thinking sustain the offbeat narrative. Readers will fall in love with this meditative and heartfelt novel.
