Adam Haberberg

With the same élan and wit that inform her internationally acclaimed and award-winning plays, Yasmina Rezas second novel, Adam Haberberg, revels in the tragicomedy of one mans 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 theres 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 outand home.

A bitingly funny, lethally wise portrait of a hapless nonheros big adventure.

"French playwright and novelist Reza (Desolation) wryly channels the thoughts of the titular depressed, unhappily married 47-year-old writer: he has just been diagnosed by his optometrist with partial thrombosis and probable glaucoma, while his wife, Irene, an engineer, seems to no longer love or care for him. With obsessions about his mortality, marriage, and failed book crashing about his head, Adam finds himself watching the ostriches in Paris's Jardin des Plantes, periodically cell-phoning his contentedly-coupled friend Albert. Recognizing Adam in the park, Marie-Thérèse Lyoc, with her bags full of the merchandise she sells to zoos and amusement parks, is energetic and talkative; in lycée, she was the invisible, faceless slave to another girl Adam loved. Out of grim resignation, Adam agrees to drive back with this open, talkative 'nauseatingly robust ghost from the past' to her apartment in the suburbs while Marie-Thérèse cooks dinner for him, and eventually shares with him a letter that reveals how she once pined for him. This revelation, 30-years-ripe, paralyzes him. In her penetrating, repetitive monologue, Reza collapses Adam's entire sense of himself, and renders his ordinariness touching, even majestic." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

In her second novel, the acclaimed author of "Desolation" paints a bitingly funny, lethally wise portrait of a hapless nonhero's big adventure--a story that revels in the tragicomedy of one man's mid-life crisis.

Yasmina Reza is a playwright and novelist whose plays Art, Life x 3, The Unexpected Man, and Conversations After a Burial have all been multi-award-winning critical and popular international successes, translated into more than thirty languages. She lives in Paris.