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    Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness
    Unavailable
    Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness
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    Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness
    Ebook307 pages11 hours

    Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

    By Jennifer Tseng

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Finalist for the 2016 PEN AWARD for Debut Fiction

    Books may be Mayumi Saito’s greatest love and her one source of true pleasure. Forty-one years old, disenchanted wife and dutiful mother, Mayumi’s work as a librarian on a small island off the coast of New England feeds her passion for reading and provides her with many occasions for wry observations on human nature, but it does little to remedy the mundanity of her days. That is, until the day she issues a library card to a shy seventeen-year-old boy and swiftly succumbs to a sexual obsession that subverts the way she sees the library, her family, the island she lives on, and ultimately herself.
     
    Wary of the consequences of following through on her fantasies, Mayumi hesitates at first. But she cannot keep the young man from her thoughts. After a summer of overlong glances and nervous chitchat in the library, she finally accepts that their connection is undeniable. In a sprawling house emptied of its summer vacationers, their affair is consummated and soon consolidated thanks to an explosive charge of erotic energy. Mayumi’s life is radically enriched by the few hours each week that she shares with the young man, and as their bond grows stronger thanks not only to their physical closeness but also to their long talks about the books they both love, those hours spent apart seem to Mayumi increasingly bleak and intolerable. As her obsession worsens, in a frantic attempt to become closer to the young man, Mayumi nervously befriends another librarian patron, the young man’s mother. The two women forge a tenuous friendship that will prove vital to both in the most unexpected ways when catastrophe strikes.
     
    Exquisitely written, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness is part wry confession, part serious meditation. At its most anxious, it’s a book about time, at its most ecstatic, it’s a deeply human story about pleasure.


    From the Trade Paperback edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEuropa Editions
    Release dateMay 26, 2015
    ISBN9781609452780
    Unavailable
    Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness
    Author

    Jennifer Tseng

    Jennifer Tseng’s first book The Man With My Face won the 2005 Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s National Poetry Manuscript Competition and a 2006 PEN American Center Open Book Award. Her second book Red Flower, White Flower, winner of the Marick Press Poetry Prize, features Chinese translations by Mengying Han and Aaron Crippen. Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness is her debut novel. She is the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

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    Reviews for Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness

    3/5

    21 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The sea in this novel embraces an island – so much could be said about the symbolism of the pairing. Suffice to say that it is an exquisite study in obsession and impermanence. There is so much wisdom here – about relationships, about silence, about passion. It’s one of those books that is going to strike people in different ways depending on their own life experience. It captures the poignancy of the movie _The Summer of ‘42_ (1971) perfectly.
    • 4/5
      I'm still not quire sure what I think of this. The writing was lovely but a bit neurasthenic, especially since the subject was passion and sexual reawakening. Much as I'm utterly played on the whole cliché of the lonely middle-aged librarian, I did like what she did with the library setting and the generally literary aura—it wasn't overly precious or book-fetishy. And the descriptions of the physical word were good and atmospheric. But the general tone was so limpid it was hard to get a head of steam up for the book itself. Still, there was something solemn and thoughtful about it that got me thinking... I'll have to ponder this one some more.
    • 1/5
      I won this book through Goodreads First Reads. I entered because: the description was unlike any book I've read before, it had high ratings, and everyone mentioned the beautiful writing.

      I hated the writing. This book was basically Mayumi over-analyzing absolutely everything. Everything went on and on and there was way too much shit in parenthesis (I found it to be VERY distracting) I find the whole thing very hard to believe - everyone knew and was okay with what was going on? Mayumi annoyed me to no end. She was a very childish 41-year-old woman. I was embarrassed by some of her actions and words towards the young man. She was like a prepubescent girl with her first crush not a married, grown-up woman with a four-year-old child to take care of.

      The two women needed some sense slapped into them.