The Book of Happiness

The Book of Happiness, although apparently written in the 1990s, at the end of Berberova’s long life, reads like a modernist novel of the early 20th century. (Both Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson come to mind). This despite the author’s own references to Russian writers such as Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Garshin as well as to Jules Verne. The Book of Happiness is divided into three sections each of which is an account (although not in any reportorial sense) of a love affair/ relationship. Three sections, but four men with whom the protagonist Vera becomes involved in some way. Each man stands, in a sense, for an aspect of the old Russia of memory, story and childhood dreams. In fact it is their storytelling that creates a common show more denominator among the four men in Vera’s life (five if one counts Vera’s father).

It is Berberova’s treatment of time, I believe, that places her writing in the camp of the 20th century Moderns. In Part Three, Vera notes that she is “alone with time, which was passing, making her neither mortal nor immortal” and that “she felt not that time was flowing through her but that she herself was time. Berberova’s prose is hallucinatory and dream-like throughout; she segues from image to image, episode to episode, as if splicing frames in a film.” The novel opens with the image of a suicide. A young man, a concert violinist named Sam, has been found dead in his Paris hotel room from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He has left the address and telephone number of Vera, his closest childhood friend, on his night stand for the hotel staff to find. Here, from the very beginning, Berberova explicitly invokes cinematic techniques: “Through the window [of her dead friend’s hotel room:] she could see the Place de l’Opéra and the beginning of the Boulevard des Capucines, as if someone had started some director’s old film running on the screen of the window.” Gazing at Sam’s dead body, Vera muses that “It was like trying to lay a negative over a printed photograph so that they coincided.” In his last letter, Sam wrote, “I’m bored. I wanted something I couldn’t have, and everything I did get bored me.” For Sam, despite love, “life is the enemy.” For Vera, life is the experience of happiness, a happiness that she defines as that which lasts. Part I of the novel concerns itself with Vera and Sam’s childhood and adolescent friendship: Vera and Sam meet in St. Petersburg when Vera is 10 and Sam is 9 (circa 1911). Sam is Jewish, Vera, Christian. Sam’s father is a lawyer and Vera’s an engineer. From the day they meet, Vera and Sam spend every free moment together. Sam’s world is that of the imagination. He is a fanciful teller of tales and the two children create an almost hermetic world together, one that lasts until Sam’s family must emigrate in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian revolution. Vera remains behind in Petersburg to endure the hunger and scarcity as well as the change in social conditions brought about by the political turmoil of the era. Soon, she too leaves Russia for Paris, along with her newly-wed, tubercular, and soon-to-be dead husband Alexander Albertovich (Alexander’s father was French, although a naturalized Russian citizen). Part II accounts for the love story (if it is one) between Vera and Alexander and the first years of Vera’s life as a Russian émigré in Paris. Part III takes place after Alexander’s death and involves two subsequent relationships: one between Vera and Daskovsky, one of Vera’s beautiful mother’s four former lovers. Daskovsky becomes something of a flawed (perhaps even suspect) mentor or confidante to Vera. A second relationship links Vera and Karelov, whom Vera encounters in the south of France after her also-widowed sister-in-law Lise whisks her away following Alexander’s funeral. Vera returns to Paris a year and a half later, freshly determined to experience, and thus to know, the fullness of life and happiness, She is soon followed there by Karelov, who appears without notice at her door. They resume their affair in what appears to be a blissful state of matter-of-factness. Upon this note, the novel ends. show less

One should beware a Russian author who puts the word happiness in their novel’s title; irony is afoot. In case you doubt my assertion – simply open to the first page of Nina Berberova’s The Book of Happiness and read the first paragraph:

Sam lay on his back, his eyes closed, right at the edge of the broad, low bed. The slightest movement and it seemed he might slip off like a sack onto the goatskin rug that was spread out over a red carpet. Jerked back by the recoil, clutching a revolver, Sam’s stilled hand reached toward the shaggy gray fur. His face, staring up at the ceiling, was calm, and only his black punctured temple (which had stopped bleeding a long time ago) lent something extraordinarily sad to the wave of ginger hair show more and paleness of the freckled forehead.

It seems that Russian happiness starts with death, more specifically suicide. The deceased, Sam, is the best childhood companion of Vera, the novel’s protagonist. Vera’s been called away from her husband’s sickbed to Sam’s Paris hotel room by the hotel manager who found her phone number on Sam’s bedside table. Sam’s death invites Vera to revisit her memories of their shared childhood in Russia before the Bolshevik’s sent his family packing. With a sharp eye, Vera sees how sentiment has lead her down paths mixed with blessings and pains, but how happiness has eluded her since her time with Sam. By mid-book, we can’t help but empathize as Vera’s tubercular and dying husband begrudges her even a brief daily stroll through Paris streets. And when he finally dies and her time of caregiver bondage ends, she apologizes for feeling free and we want to gather her up and say, “Celebrate!” Finally, like the slow unfolding of a butterfly from its chrysalis, she moves forward, away from the two deaths that defined her and into a life she defines for herself. Though she again joins her life with a man’s this time she moves into this life with maturity and wisdom. For Vera, happiness is not permanent or an entitlement; it arrives when you least expect it, can depart just as unexpectedly, and can only be appreciated after you’ve had to suffer to find it. Berberova has drawn a moving, yet unsentimental portrait of one modern woman’s path to a future that holds the best prospects for some happiness. By the turn of the last page, I find myself whispering, “Good luck and good night. I’ll think of you often.” show less

Nina Berberova apparently wrote "the Book of Happiness" while living in Paris, sometime in the late 20's or early 30's. It's about Vera, a Russian emigree, and three unique relationships in her life (one in pre-revolutionary Russia, one in post- and one in France). The book really is largely about happiness. We don't think very much about what happiness is, where it comes from, what it should feel like. Berberova's narrator is keenly aware of these things, her own pursuit of happiness, her own need for it and her lack of guilt over finding it.

This is a strange book. It is slow and thoughtful. It doesn't feel dated to me at all. At one point one of its characters muses that love is always changing; that twenty years earlier it was show more something different, that it will be recreated anew by the generations to come. That may be true, but this book shows that happiness has been constant and elusive, at least since the author's time. That it is something that needs to be and ought to be sought for and earned. wtf, right? show less

"Présentation de l'éditeur
Paris, 1923. Deux jours après son arrivée à Paris, Sam, violoniste issu de la grande bourgeoisie juive de Saint-Pétersbourg, se suicide. Véra, une jeune femme qui fut son amie d’enfance, se remémore leur rencontre, lorsque Sam avait 10 ans, et leur amitié, jusqu’à l’exil. Elle retrace son propre parcours, ses émois, ses épreuves, et trouve enfin le courage de partir avec l’homme qu’elle aime afin de découvrir le bonheur. "de Amazon.fr