Something Like Happy

by John Burnside

In these remarkable stories, John Burnside takes us into the lives of men and women trapped in marriage, ensnared by drink, diminished by disappointment; all kinds of women, all kinds of men – lonely, unfaithful, dying – driving empty roads at night. These are people for whom the idea of ‘home' has become increasingly intangible, hard to believe – and happiness, or grace, or freedom, all now seem to belong in some kind of dream, or a fable they might have read in a children's picture book. As he says in one story, ‘All a man has is his work and his sense of himself, all the secret life he holds inside that nobody else can know.' But in each of these normal, damaged lives, we are shown something extraordinary: a dogged belief in some kind of hope or beauty that flies in the face of all reason and is, as a result, both transfiguring and heart-rending.

John Burnside is unique in contemporary British letters: he is one of our best living poets, but he is also a thrillingly talented writer of fiction. These exquisitely written pieces, each weighted so perfectly, opens up the whole wound of a life in one moment – and each of these twelve short stories carries the freight and density of a great novel.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Scotland, Contemporary

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

John Burnside was a Scottish writer. He was the author of nine collections of poetry and five works of fiction. Burnside achieved wide critical acclaim, winning the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2000 for The Asylum Dance which was also shortlisted for the Forward and T.S. Eliot prizes. He left Scotland in 1965, returning to settle there in 1995. In the intervening period he worked as a factory hand, a labourer, a gardener and, for ten years, as a computer systems designer. Laterly, he lived in Fife with his wife and children and taught Creative Writing, Literature and Ecology courses at the University of St. Andrews.

[Author photo © Norman McBeath]

Reviews

[Steffi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man muss diese Geschichten ganz langsam lesen und nicht nur den Inhalt, sondern auch die Sprache genießen, die Atmosphäre, die Burnside heraufbeschwört. Alle Geschichten sind voller Traurigkeit, Melancholie, Hoffnungslosigkeit, beschreiben gescheiterte Leben und Beziehungen – und sind dennoch wunderschön. Manchmal blitzen kleine besondere, fast glückliche Momente auf, oft handelt es sich dabei um den Blick auf eine eingeschneite Landschaft und dem damit verbundenen Gefühl der Stille.

Meine liebste Geschichte ist Slut‘s Hair, eine Geschichte über eine Frau, die in einer gewalttätigen Beziehung gefangen ist und in einem Moment von körperlichem Schmerz, Betäubung und Verzweiflung etwas sieht, was ihr eine Aufgabe zu geben scheint.

Ein ganz wunderbares Buch, das noch besser ist als die Romane die ich von Burnside kenne. Warum wurde Something Like Happy eigentlich noch nicht übersetzt?

[Abbie | ab_reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75 stars

I read this collection during the great July heatwave in an attempt to transport myself to Burnside’s gloomy, rainy, snowy Scotland... and he did not disappoint! I love the way he juxtaposes urban Scotland with folklore and a sense of unease, I’ve never read anyone else quite like him.
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Something Like Happy explores the lives of various ordinary people - truck drivers, authors, husbands and wives in complacent marriages, people stuck in dead end jobs - and makes them extraordinary. He shows their secret inner lives, the beauty and hope that glimmers there, or else something much darker entirely...
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My favourite by far was Deer Larder, a deliciously dark and spine-tingling tale in which a man begins to receive unusual emails from a man who thinks he’s emailing someone else. As the emails get gradually more chilling, the protagonist wonders whether he’s the victim of an elaborate hoax, or whether he’s privy to one man’s descent into madness. I loved the way he weaved in the ethereal and folklore, while still maintaining a sense of reality!
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He also writes about some fucked up relationships between husbands and wives that are endlessly fascinating - and horrifying. Admittedly I wasn’t a fan of a few of the stories, but it wasn’t that they were bad, just not as memorable as some others!

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5) Various glimpses of torment, and the success of each successive story entirely dependent on the vacillating level of vivid evocation, as it's often hard to become invested in each protagonist's plight. As a whole: a study of passive ambiguity and estrangement.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved many of the stories here: Slut's Hair (which appeared in the same anthology as me), Peach Melba, Godwit, A Winter's Tale, and especially The Cold Outside, which chronicles the mundane life of a lorry driver who is terminally ill. He has a strange encounter with a hitchhiker, but although it makes him think and sit back a little, it is not life-changing or dramatic, and he goes back to his home and his flat relationship with his wife, just a little bit more aware of things around him. This is characteristic of this book - quiet stories that carry you and make you think and sit back. In 'A Winter's Tale' a young man minding a junk shop for a friend of his dead father sells a radio to a failed rock star and - entirely incidentally - scares away a would be robber with a knife just by being younger than expected. It is all done in a low key way. The author's a poet as the flowing prose attests. Despite not liking - or getting - a couple of stories here, I will probably get this out of the library again and re-read. It's one of those books.

[Hanieh · Rating 3 out of 5]

جان برنساید در این داستان کوتاه، خواننده را به زندگی مردان و زنانی می‌برد که در دام بیهودگی‌ها گرفتارند. انسان‌هایی تنها، بی‌وفا و حتی در حال مرگ. کسانی که به‌نظر می‌رسد شادی، امید و آزادی برایشان متعلق رویایی دور و دست نیافتنی است.

[Sean Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An almost flawless collection of stories from John Burnside. His previous story collection, Burning Elvis, is arguably the best of his early fiction - the novels don't really start doing anything for me until Living Nowhere - and this new book is a worthy successor to Elvis. Several of the stories are not too far removed from some of the novels, with their concerns for dead-end lives marked by violence in dead-end towns - the title story, Godwit, and A Winter's Tale, for example - while others are insightful character studies of people who are lost, in limbo, passing through.

What strikes me about this collection is the subtlety of John Burnside's concerns as a writer; what matters here are the slightest nuances of emotion and thought which, although transient and deeply private, are life-changing for their characters. This is not a book in which stuff happens. (Apart from a few murders, a beating or two, and some strange, darkly erotic games.) But having said that, a good short story could be defined as one in which not much seems to happen, yet everything does, if only in implication. And that defines the pieces in Something Like Happy perfectly.

Hard to choose a favourite - Perfect and Private Things, The Bell-Ringer and Roccolo are stand-outs; perhaps the best of all is The Cold Outside, an extraordinary story about a man dying of cancer picking up - in the sense of giving a lift home to - a transvestite who has been beaten up. This wonderful story is typical of the risks John Burnside takes in this book: small moments that are at once totally ordinary, and at the same time, totally unique, like those rare dreams that, once experienced, you know have somehow added something to your life; you're not quite sure what, but things afterwards are richer, stranger.

[Deb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm tossing up whether to give this 3 or 4 stars. There is no doubt that Burnside is an excellent writer and I very much enjoyed his deft use of language in these short stories. But, the subject matter became too much for me by the end of the book. All the lonely people, where do they all come from.... Eleanor Rigby could well have featured in this work. So many sad stories of lonely or outcast individuals seeking some strain of happiness. The story that stood out for me was Sluts Hair where Burnside is the voice of a battered wife with little love in her life, looking for some small thing to nurture.

I'd recommend dipping into this book now and then but avoiding reading from end to end. Dip in, savour his skillful writing then run outside, smell the roses and feel the warmth of the sun, or it all might become too much!

[Moushumi Ghosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant collection of short stories from a poet and therefore retains a fair amount of poetry in its telling. Reading Burnside is like looking under the hood of human intention. Some of them deal with the other world - for lack of a better term - whatever lies at the edge of consciousness. That which we are afraid to face and those who face them are changed forever. Those who watch from the sidelines - including us - have only the faintest idea of living a life touched by it. It's scary and satisfactory like all good stories are.

[Fattah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the question that this book leaves you with. There is something that is "like happiness", but it's definitely not happiness. It's beautiful too. It's fun, It's interesting, But is it good? And then the answer is up to you. The book says that I said that there is a fading in this "something like happiness", up to the point that you can't even see yourself anymore. You're having your fun. You eat your toast, butter and jam and look at the beautiful snow outside. But that's not all there is. It's just "something like happiness". Who said there is an absolute happiness? Maybe this is the only happiness that can be had.

The book ends and you are left with all these questions. I love when a story leaves you with questions. You can't easily forget the story, it remains.


عاشق سوالی شدم که این کتاب برای شما باقی می‌ذاره. یک چیزی هست که «مثل خوشبختیه» اما قطعاً خوشبختی نیست. خوشگلم هست. حال می‌ده. جذابه. ولی آیا خوبه؟ و بعد پاسخ رو می‌ذاره به عهده‌ی خودت. می‌گه من گفتم یه محو شدنی توی این «چیزی شبیه خوشبختی» هست. محو شدنی در درون خودت تا جایی که خودت رو هم شاید دیگه نتونی ببینی. حالت رو می‌کنی. نون تست و کره و مربات رو می‌خوری و به برف خوشگل بیرون نگاه می‌کنی. ولی همه‌ی چیزی که وجود داره این نیست. این صرفاً «چیزی شبیه به خوشبختی» هست. حالا اصلا کی گفته خوشبختی مطلقی وجود داره؟ اصلا شاید این ته خوشبختی‌ایه که می‌شه داشت. ها؟

کتاب تموم می‌شه و تو با همه‌ی این سوال‌ها باقی می‌مونی‌. عاشق وقت‌هایی هستم که یک داستان با سوال‌هایی که برات باقی می‌ذاره، نمی‌ذاره اون اثر برات به این زودی‌ها تموم بشه.

[Stef Smulders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magnificent style, a lot of variation in topics but all stories have to do with happiness in one way of another. Two stories with a surprise plottwist at the end. Worth a reread!

[Florina · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There are choices we learn to make, and there is the matter of the soul, which operates beyond convention or common sense. The best fortune a man can have is to choose with his soul, rather than with his heart or his head because, then, there is always a secret, there is always a place in his marrow that remains intact, sacred and untouchable, a noli me tangere place, like that shadowy place in the garden where Mary encountered Jesus, and didn’t even know who he was."

and


"Whenever I hear someone say that self-knowledge is the key to a happy life, I have to laugh. It’s not that I’m against self-knowledge, as such; but, for me, it’s just a hobby, like every other form of knowledge. Whatever we need to do, we do it, again and again, once the pattern is established. We can go to therapists, we can read self-help books, but we either continue doing what we have done all along, or we become something less than we were."

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started reading John Burnside a few years ago with ' The Devil's Footprints' and think he has been steadily getting better and better since, culminating in the stunning 'A Summer of Drowning', but this was the first time I had tried his short fiction. Few authors excel at both the long and short form, but on the evidence of this brilliant collection he is one to add to the list of those that do. The book is pretty much faultless - even the shortest pieces, originally commissioned for a specific purpose, which one might expect to be disposable are as good as anything else I've read this year. But it is the longer stories - 'Peach Melba', 'The Bell Ringer', 'The Cold Outside', 'Roccolo' - which truly soar and leave you breathless. An essential collection and one of 2013's best.

[Jack Deighton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like all Burnside’s prose this collection is exquisitely written. The best way to describe the effect he produces is, perhaps, liminal. The places where his stories are set are familiar, recognisable as the real world, but also strange, somewhat askew.

Something Like Happy is the tale of two siblings, Stan and Arthur McKechnie, as told by Fiona the sister of Stan’s girl-friend, Marie. The McKechnies are infamous in the town (a source of friction between Marie and her parents) but Arthur, whom Fiona only knows of through her work at the bank, is the quiet one of the family with his own strange ways. Occasionally he borrows stuff from Stan without permission.

Slut’s Hair is apparently the name for the stuff which gathers in dark corners where nobody has cleaned. Here a woman with an overbearing husband who has just removed one of her teeth with pliers since the dentist will be too expensive discovers some when she thinks it is a mouse. Her husband will not be pleased either way.

Peach Melba is the delicacy prepared for the narrator in his youth by the mysterious female owner of the House of Ice-Cream on the day that has haunted him for the rest of his life.

Sunburn is narrated by a man who, possibly due to an incident in his adolescence, cannot help every year on the first day of summer going out into the sun and falling asleep.

The title of Perfect and Private Things is taken from a poem ‘The Smiles of the Bathers’ by Walden Kees. The tale is of a not happily married woman lecturer “She had learned long ago that matrimony was not so much the occasion of romantic desire as its final, and inescapable, cure,” whose annual ritual of sending flowers anonymously to one of her students is, this year, tainted by the presence in the pub where she has a drink after visiting the florist of a group of students.

Godwit relates how Jamie’s mate Fat Stan, goes off the rails after Jamie prefers to spend time with a girl rather than him, which is an extremely reductive description of a thoughtful, finely wrought story.

The Bell-Ringer is narrated by another woman in a becalmed marriage. From a Slovakian background (with family in unmarked graves, presumably Holocaust victims) she lives in her husband’s family home and finds it unsettling, imagining the ears of listeners from times past. Her unease with life is assuaged a little by taking up bell-ringing at the local church but crystallises when her sister-in-law reveals she is having an affair.

The Deer Larder updates the ghost/fairy story for the internet age. The narrator suffers from iritis and after a day of treatment receives an email - apparently by mistake - from someone called Martin trying to entice a former lover back. Its mention of Maupassant bypasses him at first but subsequent emails draw him into wondering if he is being tantalised by an author relating Martin’s experiences. The emails stop but the story doesn’t.

The Cold Outside is what a man who has just had a diagnosis of terminal cancer and regretting the distance (physical and emotional) between his wife and his daughter feels he has more in common with than his everyday life.

In A Winter’s Tale a young lad left in temporary charge of a junk shop one afternoon brightens the place up with Christmas decorations before being rudely interrupted.

Lost Someone describes an incident from earlier story Godwit from another viewpoint. The incident, when it comes, is bewildering to the narrator but not the reader.

In Roccolo a woman on the Amalfi coast makes it her project every year to initiate a young boy holidaying in her Father’s villa complex into her strange activities with birds in the roccolo.

The Future of Snow features a policeman looking out for a wandering man whose wife died in the snow a couple of Christmases ago. She apparently mistook the day of a clandestine meeting with the policeman and slipped and fell off the path.

[Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

A respectable batch of short stories, generally carrying a sense of claustrophobia, dropping the reader as close to self-contained universes as possible. It's an uncomfortable experience. My criticism of a collection like this is that the voices narrating the stories are essentially the same. With such a range of experiences and characters, I wonder why the same voice would be showing us these intimate places and hidden brain-slices. This is a larger problem in "literary fiction," but I'm not sure everyone agrees.

If I ever have a clear idea of when I'll die, I will re-read "The Cold Outside." Heartily recommended for anyone afraid of dying.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each of these stories seems to have an edge of unhappiness or out of place-ness and characters who seem to obliterate themselves or are partially obliterated by others. Perhaps no accident that many of them have a background of snow where landscapes change and footprints will disappear. The best short stories create tiny worlds or moments which round themselves out, still leaving a question or two for the reader. These stories do that, and the prose is very delicate and lovely. I liked this book a lot.

[Betheliza · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this collection and would read it again. In fact I must have read 3 of the stories before at random before starting it as a new book. I did not enjoy Slut’s Hair’s downtrodden powerless misery, otherwise a 3.5.

[Aurora]

Read in between ikidunot seven naps, my nose hairs practically curling from the heat, and at the expense of something very important and necessary. Better stories are The Deer Larder, Lost Someone, The Cold outside, and Perfect and private things.

[Mairi Byatt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite liked this book, just realised short stories are not my book of choice!

[Maddie Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent writer, an excellent collection of stories, but difficult to read.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gritty short stories, mostly set in Scotland, that get to the heart of a diverse set of protagonists who are all something like happy.

[Suzanne Cornyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. some stories I loved, some I thought were okay.

[Sarah Jeragh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book after being completely haunted by The Dumb House, and I’m so glad I did.

This short story collection by John Burnside carries a quiet intensity, wrapped in a more grounded, everyday kind of melancholy. The Scottish atmosphere lingers in every line; foggy, soft-lit, and a little eerie. You feel like you’re walking through each story.

The themes orbit around struggle, grief, loneliness, and the stubborn pursuit of happiness or some small sliver of contentment. My favourites? Peach Melba, The Bell Ringer, and The Deer Larder.

Burnside deserves more love. An underrated author who captures the ache of being human so beautifully.

[Heather Noble · Rating 5 out of 5]

The characters in this collection of short stories are ordinary people living unremarkable lives, although the cliche "quiet desperation" did sometimes flit into my mind. Yet in each of these lives there is a secret which soothes and nourishes the soul or inner being which makes each character unique and remarkable and delivers "something happy".
John Burnside's perceptive writing evokes the essence of what it is to be human, to be alone, to be amongst others and to settle for the moments that allow hope and freedom and the possibility of happy.

The bell-ringer is poignant, The deer larder and Roccolo are dark and disturbing. Peach Melba is touching and as a whole the collection is fascinating, wry and tinged with seductive humility.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brilliant writing and really absorbing stories – mainly about lonely people (lonely both inside and outside of relationships) whose lives have gone off-track – it’s a cruel world. Very poignant, moving – at the same time I didn’t find much lightness in this set and it produced a bit of a downer in my mood. So I can give it loads of praise but not a recommendation. I really liked his novel ‘Glister’ and will definitely get some other works by John Burnside.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Doesn't feel anorexic with its prose like a lot of modern short story collections - a lot of thought seems to have gone into writing these stories and they feel real/hefty and with a purpose.

Can be tiring reading the whole collection in a single seating (I took breaks several times over 3 days) but a worthy collection and deserves to be read and re-read.

[Mark Walker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read all of his recent work, I don't think this is among his best. Unlike the blurb I don't think these can be compared to Raymond Carver - there is something more forced in these tales, if anything a bit too much going on. On the other hand I think he is striving for more poetic imagery than Carver does, and in some of the stories it comes off, and some of the images will linger.

[Maria Longley · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was nice to read a collection of short stories for a change. In many of these stories the protagonists are looking for happiness or dealing with loneliness, or its more positive form of solitude. Some of the stories were a bit on the bleak side (nasty people, washed out snowy scenes) so the short format worked just fine for them. Nice to find a new-to-me author.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A varied collection of short stories although all were quite dark and many featured the themes of either unrequited love or unloving or unsatisfactory relationships. There are a few real gems in the collection, notably for me 'Roccolo', 'The Deer Larder' and 'The Bell-Ringer'. 8/10.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

These short stories by poet John Burnside aren't dramatic or dynamic, but describe unsettling, lonely, quieter moments in the lives of the characters. A quotation from the last story I think captures the atmosphere of the collection - "the disappointment of being the people we turned out to be".

[Olivia · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review is here - I'd love to hear what you think!

http://bewhatwedo.com/2013/02/03/revi...