With the same élan and wit that inform her internationally acclaimed and award-winning plays, Yasmina Reza’s second novel, Adam Haberberg, revels in the tragicomedy of one man’s midlife crisis.While slumped on a park bench in Paris, a man is suddenly hailed by an old female classmate whom he has not seen since high school. The poor guy is, of course, a writer. Morose, panicked about his health, preoccupied with his marriage miseries and the fiasco of his recent book launch, he finds himself stranded in the desert of male middle age. And now there’s the strange business of this woman, who may or may not still be in love with him. Somehow he finds himself riding in her Jeep, riding to her place, not for any of the sensational reasons you might imagine, but because he sort of got stuck in a conversation without any chance of escape. Now he has to find his way out — and home.A bitingly funny, lethally wise portrait of a hapless nonhero’s big adventure.

« Tout le monde riait. Les Manoscrivi riaient. C’est l’image d’eux qui est restée. Jean-Lino, en chemise parme, avec ses nouvelles lunettes jaunes semi-rondes, debout derrière le canapé, empourpré par le champagne ou par l’excitation d’être en société, toutes dents exposées. Lydie, assise en dessous, jupe déployée de part et d’autre, visage penché vers la gauche et riant aux éclats. Riant sans doute du dernier rire de sa vie. Un rire que je scrute à l’infini. Un rire sans malice, sans coquetterie, que j’entends encore résonner avec son fond bêta, un rire que rien ne menace, qui ne devine rien, ne sait rien. Nous ne sommes pas prévenus de l’irrémédiable. »Romancière et dramaturge de renommée mondiale, Yasmina Reza a publié chez Flammarion L’Aube, le soir ou la nuit, Comment vous racontez la partie, Heureux les heureux (prix littéraire Le Monde 2013) et Bella Figura.

From the internationally acclaimed playwright and author of Art comes a first novel of extraordinary brilliance: the outpourings — at once eccentric, dark, and exceedingly funny — of an old man reflecting upon his life, marriages, friendships, love affairs, and the enragingly separate existence of his spoiled, and lost, only son.He has had a full life, and now, in his later years, retired, his second wife getting on his nerves, love affairs a distant memory, he has a few things that he’d like to get off his chest.As he talks — half to himself, half to the son he can’t understand — we’re introduced to Nancy, his too-happy wife; to their housekeeper, Mrs. Dacimiento, who still can’t put the bag properly over the rim of the garbage can; to his chum Lionel; to his daughter and her wannabe-truly-Jewish husband; and to the heartbreaking Marisa Botton, his idiotic, irresistible mistress. Finally, we witness his chance re-encounter with the charming Genevieve Abramowitz, who in telling him a story of her own leads him to his final overtures.Yasmina Reza has written a symphonic monologue — a passionate kvetch, a truly original work.

The internationally acclaimed playwright and novelist Yasmina Reza stages a band of eighteen characters at war with their lives, with only humor to sustain them.Happy are the loved ones and the lovers and those who can do without love. Happy are the happy.— Jorge Luis BorgesSchnitzler’s La Ronde gives these twenty short chapters their shape while Borges’s poem gives them their content. As we move from story to story, thrilled to reconnect with an old acquaintance from an earlier scene, we can’t help but admit that we are very much at home in this human comedy that understands all too well the passing thoughts, desires, actions, fears, and mistakes that we have and make day after day, but that we would be incapable of rendering with such acuity and compassion.