Happy
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"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
"Bighearted."
—New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice/Staff Pick
★Publishers Weekly ★Bookpage ★Booklist
In a rural village of Punjab, India, a moony young man crouches over his phone in a rapeseed field near his family’s cabbage farm. His name is Happy Singh Soni, and he’s watching YouTube clips of his favorite film, Bande à Part by Jean-Luc Godard. In fact, Happy is often compared to a young Sami Frey by the imaginary journalists that keep him company while he uses the outhouse. Pooing, as he says, “en plein air.” When he’s not sleeping among the cabbages and eating his mother’s sugary rotis, Happy dreams of becoming an actor, one who plays the melancholy roles—sad, pretty boys, rare in Indian cinema. There are macho leads and funny boys en masse, but if you’re looking for depth and vulnerability, you must make your own heroes.
Then comes Wonderland, an eccentric facsimile of Disneyland that steadily buys up the local farms, rebranding the community’s traditional way of life. Happy works a dead-end job at the amusement park, biding his time and saving money for a clandestine journey to Europe, where he’ll finally land a breakout role. Little does he know that his immigration is being coordinated by a transnational crime syndicate. 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 over a debt he allegedly accrued in transit. But his daydreams grow increasingly at odds with his bleak reality, one shared by so many migrant workers disenfranchised by the systems that depend on their labor.
At turns funny and poetic, sunny and tragic, Happy is a daring feat of postmodern literature, a polyphonic novel about the urgent, lovely coping mechanisms created by generations of diasporic people. Set against the enmeshed crises of global migration and the politics of labor within the food industry, Celina Baljeet Basra’s luminous debut argues for the things that are essential to human survival: food, water, a place to lay one’s head, but also pleasure, romance, art, and the inalienable right to a vivid inner life.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Celina Baljeet Basra’s touching debut novel follows an openhearted young movie lover on an incredible journey. Born on a farm in India’s Punjab region, Happy Singh Soni dreams of moving to Europe and eventually becoming a screen actor. At 18, he hands over his hard-earned savings to some scammy “coordinators” who promise to get him there, only to meet with massive “loan repayment” charges and inhumane living accommodations. Basra personalizes the topic of migration through this story of a boy who’s a fan of Godard, sweeping emotions, and the promise of living in a cooler climate. She cleverly tells Happy’s life story through his own notebooks, which are also filled with family memories, fanciful poetry, imaginary interviews, his growing Italian vocabulary, and—despite all the obstacles he faces—hope. Happy is an underdog story that will charm anyone with a heart.
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.
