The Happiness of Others

by Leon Rooke

The Happiness of Others brings together the best stories from Rooke's first two books published in Canada, The Love Parlour (Oberon, 1977) and Cry Evil (Oberon, 1980), both now out of print, with a selection of stories from The Broad Back of the Angel (Fiction Collective, 1977) which was never available in this country. At the centre of this collection is the novella `The Street of Moons', which, as Rooke writes in the introduction, `takes as its point of departure from that particularly American, particularly nasty sensibility which regards all countries, especially Latin-American ones, as adjuncts of their own property, and their people as second-class citizens who ought to be speaking English.' And as Russell Banks comments, `It's when he's funny ... which he often is, that he's at his most dangerous.... He's a writer with a voice so sharp and personal that he changes your life while you're busy laughing at it.'

260 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 1991

About the author

He is a Canadian novelist.

Reviews

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ended up giving this four stars even though a few of the stories were either disjointed to the point of incoherence or just not very interesting, because the rest were extremely good and one is a masterpiece.

Rooke's strategies and stylistic approaches vary tremendously from one story to the next making it a little difficult to discern an authorial voice but what does come through is his masterful control of language and the wonderfully surprising turns taken by his sentences.

My two favorite pieces were the novella length "The Street of Moons" and "Wintering in Victoria" which approaches short story perfection.