Review: Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu (translated by Tiffany Tsao)

These 12 stories, some a handful of pages, others much longer, are set across various Indonesian islands and cities — Sulawesi, Java, Sumatra — but most feature Batak characters from North Sumatra. Batak history flows through the stories, particularly in highlight The True Story Of The Story Of The Giant, in which the narrator pursues said story at great cost and simultaneously delves into Batak resistance against Dutch colonialism. Its devastating ending, a love that is “possible because, in this version, we lived beyond the reach of Europe’s long wooden arm”, suggests one of the collection’s pervading themes, that of alternatives, redefinition, better stories that are possible when you have control of the narrative. The same narrator concludes when writing a fictional account of the giant that he “wouldn’t have to try so hard to stay true to what had or hadn’t happened — just to what I had to say as the story’s writer”.

That idea of redefinition is encoded in the words. The collection’s epigraph is an act of wordplay, toying with the similarities between the Indonesian word hampir, “almost” in Bahasa and from the collection’s original title, Cerita-cerita Bahagia, Hampir Seluruhnya, and the word vampir. “To almost get in, to be almost accepted, to be almost there, but, at the same time, to be not there/accepted/in” Pasararibu writes, “in a world of disneyfied heterosexualities, for queer folks, what is happiness?” (He expands on that theme in a conversation with the translator included at the end of the collection). If you can only be almost happy, or almost something, as is the case for queers in many places, where does that leave you? And is there some other kind of freedom in becoming a haunting?

That almost-ness sets the mood of these stories, characters almost-but-not-quite getting somewhere, the stories themselves feeling a step short of conclusive, resisting giving you a neat ending and potentially pat resolution. So it is in another highlight, So What’s Your Name, Sandra?, which sees the titular Sandra travelling to My Son in Vietnam because it was the first thing that came up when she Googled My Son in an aching attempt to deal with the death of her son, whose name was, another play on words, Bison. Almost-ness sits side-by-side with the uncanny, and stories such as this bottle the feeling of uncanniness that death and trauma can produce.

Many of these stories play with their act of telling. A Bedtime Story For Your Long Sleep features a writer in a short story class, A Young Poet’s Guide To Surviving A Broken Heart is instructional, Welcome To The Department Of Unanswered Prayers is an induction into a new workplace. The first story, Enkidu Comes Knocking On New Year’s Eve, may be a description of a film, and in the last, Her Story, a woman becomes aware that she is a character, begins to wonder at her creator. It contributes to the stories’ lithe, spectral quality, coming at things aslant, and often twisting away from you when you want to grasp them.

To what end all this playing around? The stories tackle serious subjects: homophobia, colonialism, exploitation in various guises, ageism, sexism. It’s the drag queens’ or the clowns’ playfulness, the kind that mocks with seriousness, or is serious about mockery. That ability is one borne of oppression, of resisting others’ attempts to define your limits. Like the absurd infinite regression of sad stories in A Bedtime Story For Your Long Sleep, you cry, or you laugh.

Gay rating: 4/5 for queer characters and relationships.