The Book of Happiness

found this on the table at the strand. hooked by the opening, mesmerized by the rest. the story of a russian ex-pat and the three loves of her life: 1) a childhood neighbor in st. petersberg; 2) a sickly man with whom she moves to paris; 3) another russian ex-pat in paris. told in a simple, intense, musical, oblique, emotionally impressionistic voice. kind of reminded me of a cross between ondaatje, james salter, chekhov and tatiana tolstoya. there's a beautiful passage near the end of the novel where berberova describes the passengers she sees in a train adjacent to hers, first passing her by, then stopping so that she sees the same passengers quickly in reverse, then once again passing her by for good and leaving an open vista (something i experience daily on the subway commute to work, sans the open vista). it's exactly what reading her story is like.

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.

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.

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.