Review
Desolation
by Yasmina Reza
translated by Carol Brown Janeway
Alfred A. Knopf, 136pp.
"Explain to me the word happiness. I’m willing to believe there’s a part of one’s being that provides for it," says Samuel, midway through Yasmina Reza’s first novella, Desolation. Samuel is Jewish and French, angry as hell, and plagued by others’ happiness. His friends are dying and his wife endures him while he plots to seduce a waitress 40 years his junior. Samuel finds solace in music, certain that, "Bach will save me from you all, from your revolting versions of paradise, Bach will save my life."
Reza is best known for her five plays, which travel like fine wine – from Paris to London, to New York and beyond. Desolation might be a long-lost monologue from one of her plays – perhaps from Art, where Reza has three men tear apart their friendship over a large white painting. This seems especially possible when she writes, "Arthur has never understood how I could say, René has no taste. He has never understood how I can say, Have you seen that hideous living room? I couldn’t remain friends with someone who cannot grasp that talking about the hideousness of René’s living room like that is an act of tenderness.…" Desolation, like Art, is affection cloaked in vitriol.
The novella also accents Reza’s uncanny ability to describe men. Samuel kvetches like a Philip Roth character on the lam from a senior’s centre. He’s not done with life, friends or women. And mostly, he’s not done with his grown son, who fails him by seeking happiness in Thailand. Samuel’s rant is just beginning when he says, "Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present my son, a cut flower from the gang of cut flowers. I would have liked you better as a criminal or a terrorist, than as a militant in the cause of happiness."
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