By Megan Thomas
This was a book that I reviewed for the Innocence issue of nb magazine. As usual, I’ve included an excerpt from the magazine review below, and a few additional thoughts thereafter. As usual, you should seriously consider subscribing to nb.
“Happy has big dreams of stardom, which he creeps towards one Youtube video of him dancing at a time and notebooks filled with screenplays, which he fuels by rewatching Bande à Part by Jean-Luc Godard whenever he has a spare moment between eating his favourite sugar rotis and working in Wonderland, the local amusement park. The possibility of moving to Europe becomes a reality after endless saving and mental preparation, but unfortunately for Happy (and many like him in the ‘real’ world), his immigration process is being coordinated by a transnational crime syndicate. Once he gets to Italy, he can only work for the coordinators, whom he must pay back masses of money that they claim he owes them, but his illegal passage means he can’t work without them.”
In a world that seems largely motivated by intolerance at the moment, Happy the book (and Happy the character) managed to simultaneously shine a light on the injustices faced by illegal immigrants (many of whom, to the best of their knowledge, followed the rules), while also providing a much needed tonic to the negativity we so often face – particularly if passionate about this topic. Though all in all I think this is one of the saddest books I’ve read this year, it is also one that made me smirk, smile, cringe in that bemused kind of way, and LOL at its sheer farcicality. This is modern absurdist fiction at its finest.
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