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Summary and Reviews of Happy by Celina Basra

Happy by Celina Baljeet Basra

Happy

A Novel

by Celina Baljeet Basra
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
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  • First Published:
  • Nov 14, 2023, 272 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Nov 2024, 272 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

For fans of Vikas Swarup and Charles Yu, the story of a starry-eyed cinephile who leaves his rural village in Punjab to pursue his dreams - a formally daring debut novel set against the global migration crisis.

In a rural village of Punjab, India, a moony young man crouches over his phone in a rapeseed field near his family's cabbage farm. His name is Happy Singh Soni, and he's watching YouTube clips of his favorite film, Bande à Part by Jean-Luc Godard. In fact, Happy is often compared to a young Sami Frey by the imaginary journalists that keep him company while he uses the outhouse. Pooing, as he says, "en plein air." When he's not sleeping among the cabbages and eating his mother's sugary rotis, Happy dreams of becoming an actor, one who plays the melancholy roles—sad, pretty boys, rare in Indian cinema. There are macho leads and funny boys en masse, but if you're looking for depth and vulnerability, you must make your own heroes.

Then comes Wonderland, an eccentric facsimile of Disneyland that steadily buys up the local farms, rebranding the community's traditional way of life. Happy works a dead-end job at the amusement park, biding his time and saving money for a clandestine journey to Europe, where he'll finally land a breakout role. Little does he know that his immigration is being coordinated by a transnational crime syndicate. After a nightmarish passage to Italy, Happy still manages to find relief in food and fantasy, even as he is forced into ever-worsening work conditions over a debt he allegedly accrued in transit. But his daydreams grow increasingly at odds with his bleak reality, one shared by so many migrant workers disenfranchised by the systems that depend on their labor.

At turns funny and poetic, sunny and tragic, Happy is a daring feat of postmodern literature, a polyphonic novel about the urgent, lovely coping mechanisms created by generations of diasporic people. Set against the enmeshed crises of global migration and the politics of labor within the food industry, Celina Baljeet Basra's luminous debut argues for the things that are essential to human survival: food, water, a place to lay one's head, but also pleasure, romance, art, and the inalienable right to a vivid inner life.

Prologue

I am Happy. Happy Singh Soni.

A Punjabi currently based in Italy, I am working full-time on Europe's largest radish farm.

I am well experienced in all tasks related to radish farming: i.e., sowing radish seeds, transplanting radish sprouts, tending to the growing plants, injecting weed killers most expertly, spraying to death the ugly ones and caring for the beauties. By eradicating all uncer- tainty, the harvest is bountiful, always.

First and foremost, my labor is a labor of love.

I feel confident that I have reached a level of excellence in European radish farming. Hence, I want to widen my skill set and actively seek new challenges by exploring other aspects of farming in Italy. This is why I am applying for the open position as a shep- herd on the island of Sardinia.

Also, I have to admit, my back would thank me if I were able to work in an upright position once more. The constant kneeling amidst the radish patches is killing my spine. I often catch myself these days musing ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
  1. How does the novel's fragmented style impact the storytelling? What does the formally eclectic and polyphonic structure of the novel suggest about Happy's inner and outer worlds?
  2. What consequences does Wonderland set in motion for Happy's journey? What structural forces does Wonderland represent to Happy and his community? What is the significance of Wonderland being a copycat of Disneyland, and what do the park's divers offerings suggest about globalization?
  3. In what ways is this a workplace novel? How is it the same and different from other workplace novels you've read recently? Do the conventions of the workplace novel in Happy provoke new considerations around the politics of labor?
  4. What are the elements of Happy's immigration...
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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Celina Baljeet Basra's debut novel is a postmodernist work, characterized by unreliable narration, a non-linear structure, and grappling with relevant political and social themes of today. Happy is a dreamer who sees the world through rose-colored lenses. So rose-colored that he is fundamentally untrustworthy. Excitable, impatient, charismatic, single-minded, he is "unable to distinguish the important from the unimportant," and others "seriously question whether he has a firm grasp of what is real and what is not" (from his third-grade teacher in response to his essay on "My Future Profession"). He is willing to scrounge for leftover bakery bread, but doesn't explicitly tell us so. He also describes sharing a bed spot with an unknown irregolari who works nights, but focuses on the vivid imaginary persona he has created in his head for this character — Igor from Hungary, who makes a top-notch ragu worthy of international renown...continued

Full Review Members Only (847 words)

(Reviewed by Pei Chen).

Media Reviews

New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice/Staff Pick
Bighearted.

Jenny Wu, The Washington Post
Basra has a penchant for surrealism. Happy in many ways resembles the ingenue at the center of Yoko Tawada's dreamlike novel "The Naked Eye," a film-obsessed Vietnamese abductee in Paris. Basra's plot by contrast, calls to mind Nabarun Bhattacharya's cult classic "Harbart," a tragicomedy set in Kolkata that begins and ends with the death of its titular character ... As the work wears Happy down, his optimism grows more complex, transforming into a kind of empathetic, almost critically conscious hope ... a sobering reminder that stories about individual heroism can divert focus from the exploitative conditions that compel them to act in the first place. Tragedy, on the other hand, does not obscure the power of the hero's adversaries. Instead, it renders this power unmistakably visible. For Basra, tragedy also highlights the value of the simple needs and pleasures imperiled by criminal labor practices.

Thane Tierney, Bookpage (starred review)
In a very timely manner, Basra makes a potent point about how undocumented workers are frequently abused both economically and physically ... The humanity underpinning Happy's story will speak to anyone with a heart and a dream.

New York Times
Leaping, chattering, dancing atop this conundrum [of global migration] comes the hero of Celina Baljeet Basra's debut novel, Happy Singh Soni, his head bursting with ideas, his heart set on gargantuan dreams.

buzz mag (UK)
An eye-opening, sophisticated work, [Happy] manages to be both brilliantly funny and intensely heartwrenching as it throws light on the darkest part of our society.

Luke Kenndard, Telegraph (UK)
A zany comedy about human trafficking? This novel is genius ... strange and superb ... radiant and exhilarating ... The achievement of Basra's prose is that this arc neither exploits Happy nor the reader. We might look back to Happy's own beloved era of cinema for forerunners who dance to the beat of a different drum, outsiders who insist a better world is possible, protagonists who, if fantasists, possess the resourcefulness to survive a brutal and callous world. We can claim that we respect the humanity of the dispossessed, the exploited or the systematically oppressed, but to recognise it in fiction, as Basra has, takes this level of depth and artfulness. Despite the devastating conclusion, this is not so much a tragedy as a weaponised comedy. Politically, it's an essential novel, with an urgency that avoids the didactic – preaching neither to the converted nor the apostate.

Booklist (starred review)
First-time novelist Basra delivers a damning indictment of capitalism, a system that swallows the global poor whole and spits out wasted humans. At the same time, Basra maintains a light touch; the novel wears its burdens with good humor.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Basra's formally inventive debut traces a young Punjab man's hopeful and disenchanting migration from India to Europe...Revealed in short snippets of imagined dialogue and interspersed with the perspectives of other characters and even inanimate objects, Happy's view of the world starts off as quirky and charming, but gains increasing pathos as the divide between his starry-eyed hopes and his increasingly hopeless reality grows. Happy's singular voice echoes long after the close to this striking story.

Author Blurb Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends
A bonkers story that reads like a fine ten-course meal.

Author Blurb Megha Majumdar, Whiting Award winner and bestselling author of A Burning
Playful, funny, and wildly free, Happy inhabits the seam between beauty and tragedy. A miraculous novel.

Reader Reviews

dinda

Reading it really makes us happy
I'm sure that reading this novel broadens our horizons, there are many things that can be learned when I read this. I discovered a lot of new vocabulary and it increased my knowledge. Thank you to the author for producing extraordinary work that can ...   Read More

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Beyond the Book



Barikamà: An Italian Workers' Co-operative

Street view of the Pigneto neighborhood of Rome, location of the Barikamà warehouse, showing parked cars and detailed art depicting human faces on buildings A radish farm worker in Celina Baljeet Basra's Happy relays a tale of injustice at his previous job: a group of exploited immigrants, an attack, and an uprising. This story is one we might imagine to be derived from a compilation of worker mistreatments, but the specifics are based on a true story of immigrant fruit pickers in Rosarno, in southern Calabria, Italy, where racist attacks by locals in 2010 sparked an uprising of hundreds of workers. One of these workers, Suleiman Diara, left Rosarno and moved to Rome, where he and a business partner founded Barikamà ("resilience" in Bambara), a workers' co-operative. "I had to find a way to stop being exploited while being financially independent," Diara said in an interview with ...

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Read-Alikes

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