![]() ![]() And Thoma Chacko, Unni’s insecure younger brother, just tries to get through his life avoiding shame. Mariamma Chacko, his wife, wags her finger and speaks to the wall in small bouts of insanity. At the start of the story, Ousep receives a clue that starts him on a search to find out why his son died. Happiness is about the search for those answers, but it is also about its characters-Ousep Chacko is a drunk, a journalist, and father to Unni, who has committed suicide three years before the novel begins. ![]() Years later, he says, he still isn’t certain of the answer. Worried that life as we know it may be nothing more than “some kind of bad movie,” Joseph and his friends questioned everything. ![]() This part of the novel, Joseph says, is only fiction “in the legal sense.” “When I was an adolescent and growing up in Madras, I was part of a group which got sucked into philosophy in the sense that we were always very sure that something was going on,” Joseph says. Manu Joseph’s new novel The Illicit Happiness of Other People centers around a group of adolescent boys living in the 1980s in Madras asking one another dangerous, if standard, philosophical questions: Is this reality the only reality? Is happiness nothing more than a shared delusion? Do we pursue happiness or does it pursue us? ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |