Gelukkige dagen

by Laurent Graff

Paper Book, 2007

Library's rating

Publication

Amsterdam Nijgh en Van Ditmar 2007

ISBN

9789038827308

Language

Description

What kind of man buys his grave at the age of eighteen and chooses to spend the rest of his life in a rest home at thirty-five? Meet Antoine, the curious hero of Laurent Graff's Happy Days, an odd young man who somewhat prematurely acquiesces to his terminal destiny. The ultimate fatalist, Antoine decides to play hooky from life by retiring to the Happy Days Retirement Home. Despite the pronounced difference in age, the residents accept him, and he quickly settles into a routine as the life of the party, the sex toy of the nurses, and the best friend of an Alzheimer's patient called Al. It's a carefree life, until the arrival of a dying woman with whom Antione forms a close bond and goes on a very special journey.

User reviews

LibraryThing member akelei
Weird story about a healthy young man who buys his grave at 18. When he gets an inheritance in his early thirties, he divorces his wife, quits his job and moves into a retirement home called 'happy days' and spends his days there. He wonders what life is all about, watches the deaths of the old
Show More
people in 'happy days' but it is hard to come up with an answer about the meaning of life.
Show Less
LibraryThing member ratastrophe
Linda Coverdale was responsible for translating this novella from the original French. I'd like to meet her just so I can tell her how brilliant she is! I was overjoyed with sentences like "For this mortifying cynicism is not an end in itself, but a necessary evil in my attempt to fathom what lurks
Show More
behind our miserable human condition, an anesthesia that allows me to perform open-heart surgery on man and rummage through his guts." Not a particularly cheerful sentence but you can see how well the translation was done - sentences like this are not often found when writing is linguistically secondhand.
I'm not sure I would have liked the novella so much if it was not so skillfully presented, but as I received it I very much enjoyed it. It is quiet and endearing in all the right ways.
Show Less
Page: 0.1132 seconds