Happiness

Martin Fahrner

Martin Fahrner: Happiness

Original title: Štěstí


Genre: novel


Publisher:

Druhé město, 2023


ISBN: 9788072278961


Pages: 130

Summary


Happiness. Everyone thinks they know what it is. Few people make it real. What does it comprise? Contentment with a partner? Healthy, gifted children? Well-rewarded work? An annuity for life? A spectacular home? Think of the Stalinist Czechoslovakia of the 1950s. How could happiness be achieved there, and at what cost? To what did the pursuit of happiness expose people, and what were they forced to sacrifice? Grammar-school student Zora Mlynářová aspires to a modest, low-key life. But her “class origins” make such a thing impossible: she is daughter of the village’s biggest landowner (a kulak). Her teacher is keen to oblige those in power. Her classmates are ignorant and cowardly. Her home is watched over by militiamen (members of workers’ combat units, a.k.a. the armed fist of the working class). On top of it all, she is recklessly in love with a man whose photo appears on the “Roll of Honour” for exemplary workers.    

In Martin Fahrner’s highly evocative, plot-driven novella, Zora’s always credible narration provides a fresh view of a stifling decade which fully acknowledges the tragedy of victims of a regime without mercy. In these benighted years, the young protagonist shows courage, resilience and perseverance. But will she achieve the happiness she so desires?  


Reviews

"Martin Fahner has written a very delicate and compelling novella about desire and love.

(...) It is very readable and impressively written. The reader does not feel beset by an avalanche of one tragedy after another, even though the protagonist’s lives are at stake.

The fifties were not easy – many crimes took place and they should never be forgotten. That’s why it’s good to find a book that deals with this era but manages to have such an impact on readers that they will be happy to return to it and others like it."

Jiří Lojín, Vašeliteratura.cz

 

"Thirty-five years after the events, there seems nothing courageous about writing about the regime that plundered the country for forty years. But it’s a subject so stale that it turns out to be a very brave act after all. Martin Fahrner’s gamble has paid off. The novella Happiness presents an archetypal love story.

(…) A story superbly told in succinct chapters.

(…) Martin Fahrner seems to have put a lid on the era when the stories of the  20th century totalitarian systems were written. After a host of insipid, ineptly instructive and tendentious novels, this is a great relief, a treat even. 

(…) And so it seems that what Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (1995) came to be for the Nazi regime and its artistic representations – a kind of final chord, which some might even find kitschy – is what Martin Fahrner’s novella might be for the Communist regime. A classic tale."

Ondřej Horák, Lidovky

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