‘Happy Stories, Mostly’ is in fact a collection of melancholy stories about people who do bad things

They are not happy stories.

Not one of them. They’re stories that insist on melancholy and exploring grief and some of them were so heartbreaking they made me not only catch my breath but also stop eavesdropping on the couple at the next table (for scale, the date was not going well).

When you go to your therapist – or my second-year roommate – and tell her (It’s usually a her, sorry. Maybe a they if you’re lucky.) that you’re a terrible person, chances are 9/10 that she/they will tell you that you’re not a terrible person, you’re just a regular person who does terrible things on occasion, just like everyone else.

People who do bad things

Me being the kind of person who needs therapy, I’ve never fully believed that – what is a terrible person, then, if not one who chooses to do things that are terrible? - but Happy Stories, Mostly makes a strong case. The saddest stories – the ones which stood out the most to me, me being the kind of person who also needs antidepressants – often centre people who really, truly screwed up.

Not in that milquetoast oh-i-should-have-known-somehow-and-been-there-for-them kind of way. I mean, they really actually did significant damage to significantly innocent people. Guilt that cannot be hand-waved away, guilt that complicates every other emotion, makes for much better stories. Not that every character actually feels guilt – some are almost comically remorseless. Author Norman Erikson Pasaribu gives little importance to the moral over the aesthetic.

They’re also almost all queer, incidentally. The characters. This is not a political statement, just a note to people who like their books to have queer people in them. Pasaribu does their best to preserve the complexity of all their characters, in spite of the fact that each story is only told through one point of view.

There’s Mama Sandra, the protagonist of the second story, who pushed her son to away and now has to grapple not only with grief and lack of closure but also with self-blame; there’s Henri, a listless and callous student who also wrecks a relationship, with a classmate. The recurring motifs and themes across stories do not, in fact, render them too redundant because in many cases, but everything else about them is completely distinct.

There are exceptions. “The Department of Unanswered Prayers”, a re-imagination of heaven as your standard government office, is amusing, but ultimately does not say or do much that hasn’t been done with the concept already.

Sad but kind of weird

What the author does wonderfully - in the first story particularly - is integrate the setting with the characters such that one is inextricable from the other. Many of these stories could not have been set anywhere else; it’s admirable how seamlessly Tiffany Tsao has translated them. If there are dimensions to the story that were lost to me in translation, it was hidden perfectly.

The collection plays with form a little. These are mostly traditional short stories, but there are also some entirely in the form of conversations – one which is just a very detailed welcome speech, even. It doesn’t quite toe the line when it comes to genre, either; the literary fiction is complicated by hints of magical realism now and again, and I thought that works well.

It’s true that those stories also insist on being as vague as they possibly can, something that I found frustrating – putting aesthetics over substance is a far less successful strategy that putting it over morality. Still, whatever little we get is tantalising, not irritating. I would have loved to see more of it, and I hope it’s something Pasaribu does more of in other works.

It’s clear why Pasaribu chose such a suspicious title, the literary equivalent of Acting Natural when your crush walks by. This book is for those of us who like sad stories, and also stories that are kind of weird.

I do think the best ones are mostly clustered at the beginning of it, but also, best isn’t a very low bar in this collection. There isn’t a part of this collection that didn’t make me feel something (no, I’m not counting feelings like “frustration” and “what’s-for-dinner”; I mean feelings like “what the f*** was that” and “abject despair”).

It will probably make you think about that one terrible thing you did back then, but Pasaribu isn’t interested in putting people on trial. I think that’s what makes this collection work.

Happy Stories, Mostly, Normal Erikson Pasaribu, translated from the Indonesian by Tiffany Tsao.