The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Book of Happiness by Nina BerberovaMichael Pinker
Nina Berberova. The Book of Happiness. Trans. Marian Schwartz. New Directions, 1999. 205 pp. $23.95.
Can those who can’t be happy inspire one who can to make it a life’s work? If at first the heroine of Nina Berberova’s The Book of Happiness seems unremarkable, even mildly pathetic, gradually Berberova reveals her to be a prodigy of happiness. In pre-Revolutionary St. Petersburg, discovering and instantly loving her childhood friend Sam, worshipfully adoring her beautiful mother at her toilet, even realizing that her beloved grandfather would soon die, young Vera is overwhelmed by what she calls happiness. Later, in exile, meeting the man who would become her husband, Vera is similarly overcome, but this time her feelings play her false. Then Sam dies, her husband follows, and she embraces Karelov. Once more Vera discovers how loving without reserve brings her happiness so exhilarating as to be beyond expression in words.
What Berberova conveys about Vera is suggested by moments of illumination, which also may indicate a talent for highly wrought self-deception. What Vera experiences once as “a wild . . . blind need for goodness” later assumes other names; but, each time, the “intense” young woman reels before an emotional flood inspired by love’s poignant recognition. Sam Adler, her mother, Alexander Albertovich—each is someone to whom her devotion springs naturally, leaving her speechless with emotion; such moments alone become reason for living.
One Greek name for mankind was ephemeroi, “creatures of the day.” Berberova may be amused at the “happiness” Vera claims to feel. Are her epiphanies a joke? Surely Vera deludes no one but herself. As she serves up Vera’s erratic career in this novel, Berberova evokes Czarist Russia’s feckless exiles with so deft a touch, she seems to be writing memoirs of other selves whose loss she only half regrets. Yet while their impression remains, she evokes a wistfulness as charming as it is ambivalent. [Michael Pinker]