The Book of Happiness [Hardcover]

Nina Berberova (Author), Marian Schwartz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1999

The Book of Happiness is one of the outstanding novels the great Russian writer Nina Berberova wrote during the years she lived in Paris, and the most autobiographical. "All Berberova's characters-including Berberova herself-live raw, unfurnished lives, in poverty, on the edge of cities, with little sense of belonging-except in moments of epiphany-to their time and in life itself" (The Observer). Such a character is Vera, the protagonist of The Book of Happiness. She is seen first in Paris where she leads a dreary life tied down by a demanding invalid husband. She is summoned to the scene of a suicide, that of her childhood's boon companion, Sam Adler, whose family left Russia in the early days of the revolution and whom Vera has not seen in many years. His death reduces Vera to a flood of tears and memories of the times before Sam's departure, and thoughts about how her life has gone since. Not a cheerful prospect. Berberova spins the story with a wonderful unsentimental poignancy. The Book of Happiness is the second book from New Directions by this fine and unique writer-one who had an overview of the entire 20th century-from pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, through exile in Paris, to the United States where she lived for some forty years before her death in 1993.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Joy, at least by popular opinion, does not generally make for good reading. After all, as Tolstoy once quipped, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." How fitting that another Russian should prove him wrong--that happiness, when it comes to this novel's long-suffering heroine, should prove as unique, as variable, as interesting as the most melodramatic unhappiness.

Nina Berberova is perhaps one of happiness' more unlikely champions. She herself led the bittersweet life of an émigrée, with all its loneliness, poverty, and loss. Her fictions--many of which are only now finding English translations--are beautifully, inventively written, if somewhat chilly to the touch. What a pleasure, then, to find a heroine as brimming with life as Vera of The Book of Happiness. Unsentimental, possessed of a "dizzying equilibrium," Vera is a breath of fresh air for those used to the feverish, pawnbroker-murdering brand of Russian protagonist. Her story is told in three parts, each of which corresponds to a love of her life. In the first, the suicide of her oldest friend sends Vera spinning through memories of her idyllic childhood; in the second, she relives her marriage to a tyrannical invalid and their emigration to Paris. In the third--well, suffice it to say there's a happy ending. Very happy, and also good reading.

Berberova writes with both great feeling and great restraint. Take, for instance, the invalid's description of falling in love: "Just imagine someone who is dying of life. On his forehead is ice, on his chest a bag of oxygen, his hand in someone's dear hand. And here it all is, in you: the ice, the oxygen, and the hand." His love is the opposite of Vera's: she loves not for hysterical transports, but for the simplest and most natural of reasons. What she wants, she decides is "not 'peace' or 'freedom' but happiness, the most genuine and impossible happiness"--a state of mind as difficult to find on the page as it is in real life. In this elegant translation by Marian Schwartz, Berberova comes as close as humanly possible to reproducing the sensation of joy. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

Russian ?migr? writer Berberova, who died in 1993, is known primarily for her memoirs and her criticism. Marian Schwartz, the translator of this and previous works, helps to round out the picture with this novel, giving voice to Berberova's finely tuned, tersely evocative fiction. The heroine, Vera, is much like Berberova describes herself in her autobiography: a woman with a cool head in the hothouse world of Russian ?migr?s' Europe in the 1920s. Immediately signaling the ironic title, the narrative begins with a suicide. Sam Adler, once a musical prodigy, shoots himself in a hotel room in Paris. A hotel clerk calls Vera, to whom he has left a note: "Life tricked me... and I'm surrendering with honor before it's too late." By this Lubitsch-like conceit we then move wholly into Vera's existence. Sam is her childhood friend, and his death brings up memories of prerevolutionary St. Petersburg. Berberova vividly evokes the flight of the upper classes when the revolution strikes; how the crammed opulence of those Petersburg mansions blocks the exits. Vera, who is similarly privileged, stays, while Sam's family emigrates to America. There, he fails to find the successful career he expected; years later, he returns to Paris to die. Meanwhile, Vera meets the sickly but charismatic Alexander Albertovich, who takes her from the Soviet Union to Paris. Albertovich is reminiscent of Berberova's real-life lover, Khodasavich. He drowns Vera's youth in his own lingering death, so that when he dies, Vera feels released. She travels to Nice and embarks on love affairs, one of which sends her fleeing back to Paris with her ex-lover and his ex-wife on her heels. Berberova makes Vera's inner life so opaque that the reasons why Vera seems repeatedly to define herself in terms of sickly men remains enigmatic. Yet this book is an important addition to ?migr? literature, which, as we are discovering, is much more than just Nabokov.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 205 pages
• Publisher: New Directions; 1st Edition(HB) edition (April 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081121401X
• ISBN-13: 978-0811214018
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,018,505 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Beauty in Structure, September 15, 2000

By 

Eric Franklin (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Book of Happiness (Hardcover)

This is an exquisite little book about a woman searching for her own version of happiness. Broken into three separate books, each detailing a different segment of her life, the books power lies in its simple elegance.

On the cover of the book, Berberova is compared to some of the absolute lions of Russian literature - Turgenev and Chekhov - which puts her in some good company. I really don't know if she's as good as those two, but she definitely has style and knows how to connote emotion well with sparse description. I do wish that she had spent more time giving us a setting and a time for the story. This book ends up being solely a personal journey, divorced from the happenings in Paris and St. Petersburg.

This book, in particular, reads and works like a short story and can be gone through in a couple of hours. I don't want to give away how the whole story operates but I want to make it clear that it can appear listless until you get to that last 20-30 pages - so you just HAVE to stick with it. The ending makes you want to go back to the beginning and read it again, hopefully with a clearer understanding of where the story is going and how the main character, Vera, is getting closer to finding what she seeks all along.

While I highly recommend the text, it does come at a fairly stiff financial price. I wish that there were a paperback available.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars All novels should be this transporting, September 2, 1999

By 

J. McFarland "jbmcfar" (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Book of Happiness (Hardcover)

Fans of Nina Berberova should be ecstatic to see that one of her finest works is now available in a pitch-perfect translation by Marian Schwartz. Those who have not read Berberova until now have the perfect starting point to explore all of her work (short stories, novellas, novels and her memoir The Italics Are Mine). This ironic, concise tale of the emotional arc of a Russian woman's life from the idyllic era predating the Russian Revolution to post World War Paris is so thrilling and touching that I finished the final page wishing that all novels, short or long, could be this transporting.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A modern classic, October 11, 1999

By 

Steve Schwartz (New Orleans, LA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Book of Happiness (Hardcover)

I have to say up front that I'm the translator's proud brother. However, if I had hated it, I wouldn't have commented at all. A brilliant book, full of the precise observation we normally associate with great poetry. We see a suicide laid out, two children kissing, a ride in the winter wind, with nothing of the cliche (or at least the previously-encountered) in the details. Berberova gives you the fullness of day-to-day experience by telling you what no one else has consciously noticed. She has lifted them from the subconscious to the fore of attention. At one level, the least important, the novel is almost mechanically planned: 3 parts, nine chapters to a part, each roughly the same number of pages. That's a superficial, static structure. The organic life of the book comes not only from Berberova's depth of observation, but from her narrative technique - a kind of "backstitching." You first encounter fragments that don't quite make sense, and as you read on, the details get filled in. It's like coming into the middle of a conversation in which you don't know the people talked about. Later, when you do meet the people, you realize, "Oh yes, that's who was meant." Berberova is particularly good at evoking the "floating" state - the feeling of the mind surrounding everything - that comes from concentrated thought. You experience it along with the characters. The book opens with a spectacular description of a suicide - an odd opening for a book about happiness. Yet the title doesn't seem ironic. It really is about not just the pursuit of happiness, but about happiness itself. One may agree or disagree with the conclusions the author reaches, but one can't deny the honesty and the perception in the effort. I don't understand Russian, so I can't comment on the accuracy of the translation. However, I can say that the translator convinces me that I'm reading great literature, and that's really the only test I care about. The English prose is both lively and beautiful, the "authorial voice" vital and full of confidence. Why Berberova was so unknown for so long, I can't tell you, but in this translation, she is one of the finest modern novelists I've read.