Happy Stories, Mostly
Description
In their stunning fiction debut, queer Indonesian writer Norman Erikson Pasaribu blends together speculative fiction and dark absurdism, drawing from Batak and Christian cultural elements.Longlisted for the International Booker Prize, Happy Stories, Mostly introduces "one of the most important Indonesian writers today" (Litro Magazine). These twelve short stories ask what it means to be almost happy--to nearly find joy, to sort-of be accepted, but to never fully grasp one's desire. Joy shimmers on the horizon, just out of reach.
An employee navigates their new workplace, a department of Heaven devoted to archiving unanswered prayers; a tourist in Vietnam seeks solace following her son's suicide; a young student befriends a classmate obsessed with verifying the existence of a mythical hundred-foot-tall man. A tragicomic collection that probes the miraculous, melancholy nature of survival amid loneliness, Happy Stories, Mostly considers an oblique approach to human life: In the words of one of the stories' narrators, "I work in the dark. Like mushrooms. I don't need light to thrive."
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About the Author
Norman Erikson Pasaribu is a Toba Batak writer of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Happy Stories, Mostly (translated by Tiffany Tsao) won the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize and was longlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.
Tiffany Tsao translates Indonesian fiction and poetry. Her translations of Norman Erikson Pasaribu's fiction have won the Republic of Consciousness Prize in the UK and been longlisted for the International Booker Prize. She is also the translator of Budi Darma's People from Bloomington (Penguin Classics 2022). She also writes novels, the most recent of which is The Majesties (Atria Books 2020). She lives in Sydney.
Reviews
"Pasaribu is one of the most important Indonesian writers today." --Litro Magazine
"Happy Stories, Mostly ... navigates queer suffering with a deep supply of tenderness and humour - and with empathy for all its characters." --Exberliner Magazine
"An enticing collection, where the smallest pedestrian acts--such as finding a secret journal or getting a cubicle to work in--have the power to force characters to question their internalized biases." --Asymptote Journal
"Pasaribu tells a truth plain and human, stripped to reveal its strangeness, its absurdity,
its pain. . . A quiet but rigid resistance against that world's desire to maim the queer spirit." --Singapore Review of Books
"The book's formal diversity, epigraphs, mixing of genres, signal to a medley of
traditions that cannot easily be explained as a singular poetry from the 'margins.' By
referencing Indonesian writers like Wiji Thukul alongside Herta Müller and Richard
Siken, Sergius Seeks Bacchus emerges not from the sidelines but from within the continuous
and intertextual script of transnationalism." --The Poetry Review
"Literally and metaphorically driven underground by unorthodox desires, Pasaribu's
primary stance is seeking; theirs is a restless questing as his cast of characters search for a
shared history that is textually present but remains elusively out of reach." --Mascara
Literary Review
"A new and magical voice emerging in literature, yet one almost preternaturally wise, profoundly celebratory of the history and possibility of poetry." --Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap and Damascus
