Happiness, as Such by Natalia Ginzburg

I don’t know how to explain why I feel more alone now. Maybe it was because we shared memories. Memories only he and I knew, even though we never spoke of them when we met. I realize now it didn’t matter that we didn’t talk about them. They were a presence in the hours we spent together at Cafe Canova, those oppressive, never ending hours. They weren’t happy memories because your father and I were never happy together. Even if we had been briefly and occasionally happy, everything got sullied, ripped up, and destroyed. But people don’t love each other only for happy memories. At a certain point in life, you realize that you just love the memories.

Like Waiting for Godot, Happiness as Such revolves around an absence, really a pair of absences--the physical absence of exiled son Michele and the metaphysical absence of the elusive happiness of the title. The main characters, like Michele’s mother Adriana in the excerpt above, try to articulate something about both absences, what they mean, what they look like, what it would mean if they were present. But the “as such” in the title is a guiding principle here--no one gets much closer than a facsimile of either, though sometimes it’s enough for them.

Michele, pursued by the authorities for his involvement in revolutionary activities, has left Italy, and in his wake his family--especially mother Adriana and sister Angelica--and his friends--maybe-baby-mama Mara and bestie-and-possibly-gay-lover Osvaldo--are working to clean up the mess he’s left behind. Much of the book is either epistolary, comprised of letters between those left in Italy and Michele, or dialogue. There’s no direct speech from Michele, but most of the other characters spend time conversing, often about where, exactly, Mara and her baby are going to stay, whether or not Osvaldo is gay and if he was Michele’s lover, and what, exactly, is going to be done with the property belonging to Adriana’s recently deceased husband, especially the unfinished tower that represents the ways the various relationships in the book have been left permanently unresolved by the father’s death and Michele’s absence.

Michele himself doesn’t come off so well, his political involvements facile and his actions directed only at what will bring him the most short-term happiness--that word again. He won’t come to his father’s funeral, won’t send more than cursory responses to his mother’s letters, won’t help Mara with the baby, won’t tell the family what to do with the tower which was actually bequeathed to him. Instead his letters are filled with excuses, evasions, grand statements of future plans that come to nothing, requests for pretentious books. He’s an infuriating character, made worse by the love that the closeted Osvaldo has for him, love that’s exploited so Michele’s every whim can be met.

In the end (SPOILER), Michele is killed during a protest in Bruges, cutting short all the stories being told here. The tower is sold, unfinished, to developers, and the people who’ve revolved around Michele find themselves unmoored, uncertain what to do next. But they talk, and talk, and talk. “You can get used to anything when there’s nothing else left.” Angelica says, and it’s easy to imagine these people moving on, recentering their lives on something besides the void that was Michelle.