Hello Book Dragons!
Hope you all are having a fun-filled February. Yesterday was Valentine’s Day and International Book Giving Day. While I didn’t celebrate the former, I did celebrate the day by donating some of my books to a local students’ library. I did volunteer to spread the reading bug, after all! Hope you all had a great time celebrating both 💜
Today I am sharing my review of a book which I had the chance to read in its early days. It’s a satirical and comical book titled HAPPIMESS written by Biswajit Banerji.
BOOK DETAILS
Book Title: HAPPIMESS
Author: Biswajit Banerji
Publisher: Locksley Hall Publishing
Publication Date: 1 Jan 2020
Review Copy Format: PDF
Language: English
Genre: Fiction/Humour/Satire
Purchase Link: Amazon
Happimess is a collection of naughty stories that make us laugh while constantly poking fun at social peculiarities. Narrated mostly in the first person, the stories center around everyday situations that get oddly tangled up. Once frantic efforts are made to wriggle out, things only get more messy. Flippant and irreverent, the net of satire is cast wide, spanning conspiring home-appliances, outlandish diseases, nosy insurance agents, die-hard hagglers, a botched farewell speech and the like. It is the constant undercurrent of funny disorderliness that serves to spice-up and unite the stories.
I don’t get to read much of humour or satire (I don’t know why). Maybe it’s because in comparison to the other genres, humour (I mean as a genre) isn’t really popular within writers. Reading all those fat books with such weighty substance pushed me down into a reading slump. Now you see how heavy they were!
Thanks to Biswajit Banerji’s Happimess that proved to be a refreshing read and also helped me break off from the slump.
Banerji’s book is a collection of 12 short stories all with pun-intended situations. Each story has a different theme but the thing which they have in common is their “disorderliness” or say, their “messy situations”. Hence the title, Happimess, I believe. The title in itself is quirky and very catchy.
The stories are short and crisp. They revolve mostly around the tools or implements we use in our day to day lives and also around our programmed daily lives. Banerji made these minute little parts of our lives which we don’t even think about a lot as the central component in each of these stories.
There were four stories in particular which I really liked.
The first one would be ‘From BAD to SORDID’. This story was hilarious and I actually laughed out loud. The made up diseases, the office colleague who is confused about how he should walk and then the other people at the office being jealous of him which he was offered perks due to his “disease”; this story was really funny.
The second favourite of mine would be the ‘Humans and Electricals’ where the central character is an electric iron. I won’t disclose anything about it because the story is already short and if I give out something, where the fun would be? This story was amusing but not the laugh out loud kind as was the case for the first one.
The third favourite of mine would be ‘The Haggler’s Manual’. This story is about the act of haggling and the way the manual for this technique is written is the humorous element in the story.
The fourth one which I really liked would be ‘Oh! CD’ where OCD proves to be a contagious disease when it’s not. This story was very witty and satirical. It had a “smart” type of humour.
Overall, all the stories carry a sense of humour in them and each one of them reflected a different type of humour. While one was laugh out loud, another had a deadpan humour, some were sarcastic and others were satirical. So, there were a wide range of humour that went into the book.
Banerji has such a good command over language. The writing style is truly commendable. The way he has structured the sentences is what I loved the most about the book. The language is sophisticated and it might be a bit difficult to understand for beginner readers but I am not complaining! I am all in for a good word play.
What I felt lacked in the book is the flow and in case of the genre of Humour, I feel that the flow is a very important part. Since the language is sophisticated, I felt that it sort of restricted the flow of the stories. Humour to me should be light so that it can refresh you a bit if you have been reading too much of heavy reads. I do love when a book has a very good language but when it comes to comedy or humour, I feel that it is better to go a bit light over the language. The stories didn’t feel free to me. They all felt as if they were constricted. This point was really difficult for me to pick out since I like to see a good vocabulary use in the narration but in this case, I have to say that the language sort of hindered the flow in the book.
The stories for sure are witty but as I have mentioned earlier they are not over the top funny. They have this underlying sense of humour which you have to be witty enough to catch it.
If you like “smart” kind of humour, satires and sarcasm, Happimess could be your pick for the next read.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION: Love a heart-wrenching YA Fiction that will make you think twice? Read my review of The Sky is Mineto know why it’s one of my recent favourites. 🌻
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Until next time,
Sohinee Reads & Reviews 