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the complete review - fiction

Happy Days

by
Laurent Graff

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : amusing melancholy trifle

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Der heute 33-jährige Laurent Graff versteht es eigentlich recht geschickt, die bittere Note des kleinen Romans mit Witz und eingestreuter Situationskomik zu konterkarieren. (...) Da die charakterliche Profilierung dieses Antihelden letztlich aber blass und er selbst hinter seinen anspruchsvollen Räsonnements zurückbleibt, dürfte die Sympathie des Lesers für ihn eher verhalten ausfallen." - Thomas Laux, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
  
  
• "In this adept translation by Linda Coverdale, however, the collapse of Antoine's fatalism redeems the narrative." - Tim Wilson, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Graffs Roman Feierabend hätte eine Replik auf Michel Houllebecq werden können, und als solche ist sie auch gemeint. (...) Milde Humanität wäre nicht die schlechteste Antwort auf Houllebecq, aber bei Graff gerinnt sie zu ihrer Schrumpfform: Zur Rhetorik der Erbauungsliteratur." - Felix Müller, Die Welt
  
  
• "Graff's static and articulate but inexplicable hero will inspire primarily the latter emotion in readers, with flashes of the former; moments of gorgeous prose leaven a sharp, dark and very French quasi-comedy about a man whose life revolves around death." - Publishers Weekly

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Happy Days is narrated by Antoine, who already felt he'd experienced it all by the time he reached eighteen. He gave adult life a try -- he got a job, married, had kids -- but it wasn't really for him. A small inheritance then allowed him to do what he really wanted to do: retire. Age thirty-five, he checks himself into the Happy Days, a retirement home.
       His choice is not one of laziness, but rather personal philosophy: he doesn't much believe in life when, after all, death is all that can be expected from it. In this small novella he describes his life, then and now. Happy Days is the logical conclusion to his philosophy of life, and he's glad to be able to settle in there earlier than most. Always more a contemplative than active sort, he's almost perfectly content there, able to "kill time from day to day with the patience of a torturer."
       Antoine is fascinated by by the inevitable (he bought his grave and tombstone when he was eighteen, and tends to them carefully, replacing the plaque with the inscription that goes on the tombstone occasionally), and it's one of the things that draws him to the other residents. He claims: "I want to be free of all ties, emotionally blank", but that isn't always easy to accomplish. (He does quite well, though.)
       His life-choice is one big experiment:

My retirement in Happy Days should allow me to understand what an individual's life is, stripped of all diversions, seen in the light of its dénouement.

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Links:

• Le Dilettante publicity page
• French Publishers' Agency information page

• Bookslut
• Falter (German)
• hackwriters.com
• Journey with Books
• Lire (French)
• The New York Times Book Review
• Publishers Weekly

• The Scream

• See Index of French literature at the complete review

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About the Author:

       French author Laurent Graff was born in 1968.

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© 2005-2013 the complete review

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