The Book of Happiness,Used

Amazon.com ReviewJoy, 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 wrongthat happiness, when it comes to this novel's longsuffering 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 migre, with all its loneliness, poverty, and loss. Her fictionsmany of which are only now finding English translationsare 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, pawnbrokermurdering 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 thirdwell, 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 ParkProduct DescriptionThe 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 charactersincluding Berberova herselflive raw, unfurnished lives, in poverty, on the edge of cities, with little sense of belongingexcept in moments of epiphanyto 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 writerone who had an overview of the entire 20th centuryfrom prerevolutionary St. Petersburg, through exile in Paris, to the United States where she lived for some forty years before her death in 1993.From Publishers WeeklyRussian ?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 narra