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A review by theuneditedbookreview
The Shelf Life of Happiness by Hillary Locke, David Machado
4.0
Highly popular in Portugal, there is important background to this book that audiences reading in translation may miss.
Shelf Life follows Daniel as he talks in his own head to his imprisoned brother, Almodôvar. Having experienced job loss and separation from his family, Daniel's hardly-flinching optimism and hope comes in conflict with the muck and mire of life.
While most of the events in the book are more or less loose happenings unified only by Daniel's voice, a ot takes shape in the second d half of the book. Prompted by his friend Xavier (who it seems is depressed, though Daniel--most annoyingly--will not accept), Daniel and his kids set off with Xavier to help a paraplegic woman say final good-bye to her comatose brother.
Daniel's obstinate hope and desire to be "happy" meet their match in the woman's resolve that her brother is gone and she need not hope for his recovery to be happy. Good-bye is enough.
The story was interesting enough, but Daniel is frequently unbearable. His attitide, his unforgiving demeanor compound with his confidence in a universe that simply "works" make him a semi-tolerable pain in the arse. How, perhaps Daniel is a stand in for the final collapse of our hopeful, Western modernism into... whatever we're in now.
Shelf Life follows Daniel as he talks in his own head to his imprisoned brother, Almodôvar. Having experienced job loss and separation from his family, Daniel's hardly-flinching optimism and hope comes in conflict with the muck and mire of life.
While most of the events in the book are more or less loose happenings unified only by Daniel's voice, a ot takes shape in the second d half of the book. Prompted by his friend Xavier (who it seems is depressed, though Daniel--most annoyingly--will not accept), Daniel and his kids set off with Xavier to help a paraplegic woman say final good-bye to her comatose brother.
Daniel's obstinate hope and desire to be "happy" meet their match in the woman's resolve that her brother is gone and she need not hope for his recovery to be happy. Good-bye is enough.
The story was interesting enough, but Daniel is frequently unbearable. His attitide, his unforgiving demeanor compound with his confidence in a universe that simply "works" make him a semi-tolerable pain in the arse. How, perhaps Daniel is a stand in for the final collapse of our hopeful, Western modernism into... whatever we're in now.