A Few People Search for Happiness and Laugh Themselves to Death

In her 1997 debut novel – just before the turn of the millennium – Sibylle Berg, “in a closed space beyond death”, tells us a story about three generations of losers. Egocentrics with relationship issues who can’t find their place in society, don’t believe in anything, can’t find anything positive in the world, whose life is no consolation to them, whose search for happiness is completely in vain and whose only survival strategy is alienation. This episodic novel became a sensation soon after it was published, as it gave a completely new voice to this mute and paralysed era. The author’s style is unique: unyielding and precise, cold, direct, rude, almost mechanical, her humour biting and cynical, in places grotesque. Loneliness, powerlessness, despair, suicidal thoughts, anorexia, violence, lust and sex get a completely new image in her signature multi-perspective narration style. She manages to find beauty in the banalities of everyday life.

Sibylle Berg was born in Weimar, Germany, and lives in Zurich and Tel Aviv. She has written twenty-one plays and thirteen novels; she also writes opinion pieces and reportages for a number of newspapers and magazines. She has become an icon of German alternative subcultures, she’s followed by the European LGBTQ community and artistic communities. Her works have been translated into more than thirty languages, and she is placed alongside the authors like Vonnegut and Houellebecq. A Few People Search for Happiness and Laugh Themselves to Death is the first translation into Slovenian of this established, renowned and provocative German-speaking author. The Slovenian first staging was directed by Eva Nina Lampič, for whom this is the debut on the SNG Nova Gorica stage.