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Happy are the Happy, by Yasmina Reza
Free Ebook Happy are the Happy, by Yasmina Reza
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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.
- Sales Rank: #591013 in Books
- Published on: 2015-01-27
- Released on: 2015-01-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.56" h x .80" w x 5.79" l, .81 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 160 pages
Review
“Like a handful of the 18 people who populate her latest novel, Happy Are the Happy, Yasmina Reza is formidably accomplished…Happy are the Happy is another coup, a quick and delicate book that’s as funny as it is humane….Characters chime with one another in ways they never realize, a conviviality that is bittersweet. Their voices are self-aware, a little jaundiced, vulnerable, sometimes plaintive, and entirely authentic…Reza is attuned to intensity and banality in equal measure... 'Even if you demolish me,' Nicolas Sarkozy supposedly told Reza, … 'you will elevate me': a ventriloquism that encapsulates her method and her gift.” —The New York Times Book Review
“The characters in these 21 brief, bittersweet and playfully interconnected stories by the French playwright Yasmina Reza (“God of Carnage”) hold tight to philosophies about love…[Reza] fills the stories, most of them six to eight pages long, with efficient detail, making them feel, perhaps unsurprisingly, like a series of vibrant one-acts.” —The New York Times
“[Reza] is a caustic and witty observer of social behavior...[Happy Are the Happy] is a collection of first-person monologues by eighteen French people whose lives intersect with friendships and rivalries, a ronde, funny but sad, saturated with the longings and competitiveness implied by the broad term “jealousy,” and just enough tantalizing whiffs of the roman à clef, involving French political figures, to remind us of the potency of this emotion in real life all the time.” —The New York Review of Books
"The twenty-one interconnected monologues in this meditation on parenting, death, and relations between the sexes manage to make domestic trifles seem electrifying. With implacable wit and a dramatist’s sense of timing, Reza offers snapshots from the psyches of eighteen characters, including a couple who squabble over Morbier cheese and stuffed hamsters, and a retired financier and statesman who taunts his exasperated wife with instructions for his funeral. The tone is wry, warm, and accepting." —The New Yorker
"[A] spirited novel...To read Happy Are the Happy is to feel happier after closing the book than one was before opening it. Ms. Reza...writes in an assured, economical manner. She can lead her lifelike, not always likable, characters from the need for enslavement to the desire for freedom in a few deft strokes." —The Wall Street Journal
"Reza is a terrific observer of the rhythms of people and relationships. Her writing is amusing and insightful. With Happy are the Happy, Reza has pulled off something both unexpected and magical in a very small book that packs a real punch." —NPR.org
“A galère of marital bad behavior—infidelity, a brawl at a cheese counter—can be found in Yasmina Reza’s blisteringly funny Happy are the Happy.” —Vogue
“[Reza’s] new novel may mark a sea change, in part due to the risky intimacy of its subject: love…Bookended by Odile and Robert’s story, which moves from their children’s bedroom to the bridge from which they scatter the ashes of Odile’s father, these delicate, odd-cornered miniatures of human isolation and connection take on a cumulative power…the real discovery here is how the novel’s interiority showcases her aphoristic style. The novel is filled with zingers.” —Vogue.com
"Yasmina Reza's specialty specialty is the excavation of long-simmering violence from underneath placid bourgeois surfaces. [Happy are the Happy] is at once touching and prickly, coldly elegant and exuberantly warm." —The Jewish Daily Forward
"Compelling." —Kirkus Reviews
"With sharp insight, Reza quickly penetrates the thoughts and actions of [her] characters to reveal just how happy (or not) they really are...Charming...delightful, witty." —Library Journal (starred review)
"Reza’s stories build and build, creating a complicated, multifaceted world." —Publishers Weekly
"Reza [is] ever the sharp observer of human interaction." —Christian Science Monitor Online
"Yasmina Reza's achievements in Happy Are the Happy are considerable. Happy Are the Happy is an evocative little book, one that spears the narcissistic vicissitudes that dominate the minds of an educated, professional class. It will seduce you with its wit, and it will require you to think hard with it about language, that damning and defining material of our lives." —Bookslut
"[E]ntertaining...Reza, through her characters, offers insightful comments on the nature of romantic entanglements." —Bookreporter.com
"A title such as this cries out for an ironic exegesis—and in her latest novel, Yasmina Reza delivers this magnificently. This is a deft, shrewd, frequently anguished, occasionally hilarious investigation into the endless way in which we make ourselves miserable." —The Times Literary Supplement
"[Happy are the Happy] confirms Reza as a sharply observant wit." —The Independent
"Reza...creates moments of intense drama, exhibiting the tensions and conflicts crackling through lives. The author skilfully peels away the veneer of life to reveal the secrets seething within." —The Guardian
"[Reza] has a superpower for zeroing in on each beat of an argument, each buried emotion." —The Times (UK)
"Yasmina Reza has set herself a challenge in her latest novel, and she rises to it beautifully." —The Economist
"Happy are the Happy is a spiky, brilliantly observed novel about marriage, infidelity, dreams and disillusion." —The Telegraph
"Reza has form for nailing relationships in all their joy and ugliness. But she does so with the lightest, sharpest skewer imaginable." —HarpersBazaar.co.uk
"Bittersweet, yet beautiful to read." —Daily Mail (UK)
"Reza’s question...is whether conformity, in the end, brings happiness." —Financial Times
"[Yasmina Reza's] power lies in acute observation, in her ability to weave together short, decisive tales that infiltrate our outer defenses to reveal the fragility we keep hidden underneath, safely tucked away, just out of view from those around us." —Typographical Era
“Few playwrights succeed at fiction, with the notable exception of Chekov, and in this novel, Yasmina Reza resembles him. Her prose strikes the same balance between tenderness and acuity, irony and sorrow, worldliness and the courage to feel deeply. Everyone’s domestic life, she suggests, is a tragicomic shipwreck—but this beautiful book consoles you for your own.” —Judith Thurman, author of Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire
“I'm told that it's common to dream about discovering in one's own apartment hitherto unknown rooms, that it's a way of imagining a solution to a situation that feels impossible. This collection of short fictions by the brilliant Yasmina Reza reminds me of those dreamed of rooms, hidden away somewhere within our own ordinary houses, giving us space to understand what feels too forbidden, or too sad, or too weird. This is a funny and wonderful and wise book.” —Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances and American Innovations
"If I could do exactly what I want to do, I'd read [Happy are the Happy] again. The structure alone is a marvel, the way the author weaves people and connections into the monologues so that relationships and ironies and tensions slowly become apparent. The resonance increases from page to page. The prose is full of memorable, incisive passages, little observations that ring true, fleeting moments of quiet desperation. And the recourse to laughter, because what else is there, informs the whole. The best literature makes you feel bad and good at the same time, and that's what happens here. It's really an accomplished piece of work." —John Cullen
“With penetrating wit, Yasmina Reza tells a tale of how the harmony of human relationships is constantly under threat.” —Romain Leick, Der Spiegel
“In Happy Are the Happy, Yasmina Reza tackles existential questions with a light, sparkling touch.” —Het Parool
“In the confrontation with life and whatever comes after it, only comedy offers freedom. This truth provides the framework of Reza’s oeuvre, and she experiments with it better than anyone else, in language of immense tact and shattering sensitivity. Happy Are the Happy is her most beautiful text, her great novel of human consternation.” —Jean Birnbaum, Le Monde des Livres
“At once funny and tragic, Happy Are the Happy scans the spectrum of contemporary neurosis and exposes where it truly hurts.” —Thierry Gandillot, Les Échos
“Reza describes her toxic couples with detachment and surgical precision, and with an infallible sense of dialogue.” —Fabrizio Coscia, Il Mattino
About the Author
Yasmina Reza is a playwright and novelist whose plays have all been multi-award-winning critical and popular successes and have been translated into more than thirty languages. She has written six books, including Dawn Dusk or Night: A Year with Nicolas Sarkozy (Knopf 2008). She lives in Paris.
John Cullen is the translator of many books from Spanish, French, German, and Italian, including Yasmina Khadra's Middle East Trilogy (The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack, and The Sirens of Baghdad), Eduardo Sacheri's The Secret in Their Eyes (Other Press), Carlos Zanón's The Barcelona Brothers (Other Press) and Rithy Panh's The Elimination (Other Press). He lives in upstate New York. The author lives in Paris, France.
Most helpful customer reviews
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
This is a book that has something to say to everyone and it isn't always that comfortable to hear so every one starts laughing
By Edward Sokolowski
Do me a favor, when you have friends over for dinner, just read a chapter aloud. You will have so much success ! This is a book that has something to say to everyone and it isn't always that comfortable to hear so every one starts laughing. This is a book about relationships, our illusions, our failures and our narcissistic collapses. It is also about parents and children and friends and homosexuality and pain and seduction and everything else that matters but can only be told in tiny vignettes so that it gets under our skin. It is a masterpiece really. Rarely did I read something so perceptive.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
"I'd like to suffer for love."
By DanD
In this novel disguised as a collection of vignettes, author Yasmina Reza (by way of translator John Cullen) offers us a brutally honest portrait of all the facets of love, from a couple who argue about cheese, to a doctor who fantasizes about encounters with young men in alleyways, to an elderly man distraught over what will become of his ashes. These are short, loosely conjoined chapters each told with a different point of view; sometimes humorous, sometimes melodramatic, but always emotionally true.
HAPPY ARE THE HAPPY, by its very nature, feels fragmented. Some of the chapters stand on their own, and as such you can view this as a collection; but most need the others to prop them up, and this is where things become tricky. Reza's writing is solid and lyrical; however, as each vignette is told as basically one paragraph, the pages get crowded. I know this may just be a stylistic bias on my part, but the lack of white space leaves little room for pause. Now, in some books that may not be such a bad thing; but Reza presents so much emotion in these few pages, the reader actually needs to pause for breath every now and then. HAPPY ARE THE HAPPY is intriguing, and I do recommend the experience. It didn't pay off fully for me, but with a book like this, you put into it what you bring with you.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Married People Learn To Live Alone...
By Laurence R. Bachmann
So says a French adage, and so might say Yasmina Reza author of Happy are the Happy a title borrowed from a Borges poem. In short (some might argue too brief) chapters the author relates a personal vignette of an experience or an incident. It is followed by a vignette of a person mentioned earlier and continues to extend out in a rippling pool effect that introduces a score of persons. Some are peripherally related, others intimate. In Happy are the Happy we meet young couples and old; widows and twenty somethings; chemo patients and their oncologist who is not adverse to a little rough sex. Sentimentalists and cynics, the indifferent and the obsessed. People who hurt each other physically and emotionally, sometimes unknowingly but usually with intent.
Each struggles with the frustrations, the annoyances the heartache that comes with trying to find happiness through husbands, wives, children, friends. There are users and used, enablers and punishers. It's a bouillabaisse of types and temperaments that could seem like a charivari of sorts with a less assured writer. For me they remained people, not types each story an opening of the lens showing how we struggle to couple or decouple, share or care; be a partner or an individual. Many offer keen observation-- "other people's happiness somehow seems aggressive." Or "We always go to my place. I'm tired of being the easy option." Or "Two people live side by side and every day their imagination separates them more and more." More than a gift for 'bon mots' Reza has real insight into the panoply of contradiction that crop up during a life that is shared.
Happy are the Happy reminded me of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads monologues which I think are brilliant. These vignettes are unpretentious in the same way but I think so much more than what meets the eye, first impression. I often found myself circling back to passages or pausing to consider a particular remark. Isn't that why we all read? The translation by John Cullen seems quite good; conveying the French. Expressions such as 'he showed his mean teeth' or 'cheese monger' and 'toilet room' convey feeling of Frenchness that would be lost if English idioms were substituted. I appreciated the effort.
I see that a few people like Happy are the Happy much less than me, but after reading a few of the pans I have to respectfully disagree. I enjoyed it thoroughly finding it witty, insightful and very worthwhile.
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