Description
Book SynopsisHow has a liberating principle of the Enlightenment - the right to pursue happiness - become the unavoidable and burdensome responsibility to be happy? How did we become unhappy about not being happy - and what might we do to escape this predicament? This book considers these questions.
Trade ReviewFinalist for the 25th Annual Translation Prize (Nonfiction), French-American Foundation & Florence Gould Foundation "Perpetual Euphoria is a beautiful essay. Lively, corrosive, brilliant... [W]oven from pure emotion."--Le Journal du Dimanche "A writer who has inherited the mantle of the French moralists' grand tradition."--Le Monde "Pascal Bruckner's essay is a subtle attack, both scholarly and ironic, against the new obligation of being happy."--La Croix "As an essayist in the tradition of Kundera and Montaigne, Bruckner has a bracing knack of distilling the attitudes of the contemporary moment and helping us appraise them anew."--The Age "The happiness-promotion and happiness-backlash schools are locked today in a weird, symbiotic struggle. Weighing in on the side of the anti-happiness underdog is this sublime rhetorical performance by the novelist and philosophe Bruckner, denying serially that the individual has a duty to pursue happiness; that happiness could be a social goal; that happiness is the opposite of boredom, or the absence of suffering, or the fulfillment of plans."--Steven Poole, Guardian "This book is stimulating, sometimes funny, and an antidote to the worship of all that is considered 'cool.'"--Julia Pascal, Independent "[A] brilliant book... Perpetual Euphoria is more than a book. It is a manifesto. It is a work of genius. It is my bible."--Roger Lewis, Daily Mail "Pascal Bruckner ... in this witty, iconoclastic and thoroughly enjoyable polemic he shows how anxious and miserable life becomes when it is ruled by an obsessive preoccupation with feeling happy. Bruckner's range of reference is admirably wide... [Perpetual Euphoria] is studded with arresting thoughts and questions."--John Gray, Literary Review "[Perpetual Euphoria] is a hugely entertaining argument that traces the pursuit of happiness through the French and American revolutions and concludes that we should all relax because it is only through peace of mind that true happiness is found."--Bruce Elder, Sydney Morning Herald "[T]his exciting book explores the vicious paradox that the Enlightenment has left: one is obligated to find happiness and punish oneself if one fails to do so... [T]his book is fun to read."--Choice "Bruckner gives us a nuanced and mature reflection on the nature of happiness in light of past reflections and cultural criticism of the West... [He] is well worth reading, especially since he cannot and has not escaped framing his entire book in the Christian categories of Augustine, Thomas, and Pascal."--Gregory Edward Reynolds, Ordained Servant Online "This lively and acerbic exploration of happiness attacks the assumption that we somehow have a duty to be happy, that to fail to achieve happiness is in effect to fail as a human being, and offers the intriguing alternative view that an interesting but difficult life has more value than a comfortable but trivial one."--Good Book Guide
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Invisible Penitence 1 Part I: Paradise Is Where I Am 7 Chapter One: Life as a Dream and a Lie 9 Chapter Two: The Golden Age and After? 27 Chapter Three: The Disciplines of Beatitude 39 Part II: The Kingdom of the Lukewarm, or The Invention of Banality 67 Chapter Four: The Bittersweet Saga of Dullness 69 Chapter Five: The Extremists of Routine 84 Chapter Six: Real Life Is Not Absent 106 Part III: The Bourgeoisie, or The Abjection of Well-Being 129 Chapter Seven: "The Fat, Prosperous Elevation of the Average, the Mediocre" 131 Chapter Eight: What Is Happiness for Some Is Kitsch for Others 149 Chapter Nine: If Money Doesn't Make You Happy, Give It Back! 163 Part IV: Unhappiness Outlawed? 181 Chapter Ten: The Crime of Suffering 183 Chapter Eleven: Impossible Wisdom 206 Conclusion: Madame Verdurin's Croissant 227 Index 233
