Adam Haberberg
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning author of Art and Desolation comes this bitingly funny new novel that follows the absurd adventures of a man struggling with a midlife crisis.
Adam Haberberg is losing his sight in his left eye. His new book is a flop. And his marriage isn’t doing too well. But while sitting one day on a park bench, he sees an old friend from high school, Marie Thérèse, and suddenly his whole life seems to change. Adam soon finds that his own life has somehow become intertwined with Marie Thérèse’s, throwing everything into question. A wry tragicomedy and a nuanced study of a man in the throes of an existential crisis, Adam Haberberg has the same wit and panache that have marked all of Yasmina Reza’s work to date.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
French playwright and novelist Reza (Desolation) wryly channels the thoughts of the titular depressed, unhappily married 47-year-old writer: he has just been diagnosed by his optometrist with partial thrombosis and probable glaucoma, while his wife, Irene, an engineer, seems to no longer love or care for him. With obsessions about his mortality, marriage, and failed book crashing about his head, Adam finds himself watching the ostriches in Paris's Jardin des Plantes, periodically cell-phoning his contentedly-coupled friend Albert. Recognizing Adam in the park, Marie-Th r se Lyoc, with her bags full of the merchandise she sells to zoos and amusement parks, is energetic and talkative; in lyc e, she was the invisible, faceless slave to another girl Adam loved. Out of grim resignation, Adam agrees to drive back with this open, talkative "nauseatingly robust ghost from the past" to her apartment in the suburbs while Marie-Th r se cooks dinner for him, and eventually shares with him a letter that reveals how she once pined for him. This revelation, 30-years-ripe, paralyzes him. In her penetrating, repetitive monologue, Reza collapses Adam's entire sense of himself, and renders his ordinariness touching, even majestic.
