[”La felicidad” puede adquirirse, como libro digital, en Bajalibros, clickeando acá]
In the latest rankings published by the ILHSA Group, which includes all the Yenny and El Ateneo bookstores, The happiness of Gabriel Rolon It was crowned the best-selling book. And this is not a fact that stands out now, nor last week, nor the previous week. Since its publication, at the end of 2023, The happiness It has been leading all the lists. From these bookstores and others. We are dealing with a best-selling author, yes, but there is something special in this book: what does he say, what is he, what does he address, what does he propose?
“The art of listening to desire,” reads on the flap of the book. psychoanalyst. “As impossible and as a chimera, as an end and also as an imperative, the idea of happiness challenges us more than ever in these times. ‘How to be happy?’, that sentence that hovers over us as a mandate of the modern world, was imposed to dazzle us and make us lose sight of what should be the nodal question: ‘What is happiness?’”
[Los libros de Gabriel Rolón pueden adquirirse, en formato digital, en Bajalibros, clickeando acá]
According to the book itself, published by Planeta, the publisher of which he is a regular, “Rolón proposes that we retrace our path. Dismantle commonplaces and preconceptions to reveal what is hidden beyond that illusion that is sold as a panacea and is nothing more than a trap.” How does he do it? From the hand of authors such as Byung-Chul Han, Freud, Lacan, Borges, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Einstein, Alejandro Dolina, Anne Frank, Bertrand Russell and Comte-Sponville.
“Life is a very difficult place and we tend to idealize things: love, friendship, life itself. Let’s not also idealize happiness. If we have a choice to be happy, it will never be without a little sadness, without a little absence, without a little pain, without some loneliness and without faults. If any happiness is possible, we have to accept that it will be an imperfect happiness,” he writes. Gabriel Rolon In this new book, which, in addition to being a great success, proposes to open the umbrella of criticism.
For the author of successful titles such as The duel, Encounters and Divan stories, There is no magic formula to be happy. There is no simplistic advice or easy recipes since “an analyst is not a giver of answers but a generator of questions.” But, in any case, faced with a proposal of Andy Kustnetzoff in the program street dogsin which he participates, Rolón “played” to condense ten ideas to move towards happiness but, yes, without idealizing it.
“This was the book that cost me the most to write,” he admits in the prologue. He presented it on several occasions to a remarkable turnout. A month ago, he did so at the Buenos Aires Book Fair. “Despite the cold and a very cloudy day, hundreds of people, several hours before, stood in a very long line to secure a place at the talk that took place in the José Hernández room, the largest in the venue,” he says. Noelia Gomez in a chronicle published in Infobae Culture.
That day, Rolón was accompanied by the journalist Barnabas Toulouse in front of a completely full room. There he received a distinction before beginning his presentation, celebrating that his book is the group’s best-seller in the last five years, with more than 150,000 copies sold in Argentina alone, in addition to its publication in Latin America and Spain. “It is a lie that happiness only depends on us,” she said at the Buenos Aires Book Fair.
Another fragment of Gómez’s chronicle: “The recognition of The happiness as a best seller it was delivered by Adriana Fernandezeditorial director of Planeta, evidencing the significant impact of the work since its launch in December 2023. Rolón expressed his gratitude to the public and pointed out the importance of the connection between the author and his readers: ‘A book begins when the idea arises and it is complete when it comes to you.’”
Before, in February, he presented it in Mar del Plata, in a hotel in Playa Grande. “While dozens of people waited outside for perhaps a chair to be freed, Rolón (born in La Matanza, in 1961) broke down his most recent work without a script at the closing of the Verano Planeta writers’ cycle, and revalidated his direct link with his readers. , built over more than 15 years, since the publication of Divan storiesin 2007″, reads in the chronicle of Alfredo Ves Losada.
There, Rolón said that “all of us in our intimate forum feel that we are going to be the first immortal. We want to continue to exist because it is very difficult to imagine nonexistence. That is why religion, mythology, and beliefs come to explain a world that we cannot imagine. We do not want to die, obviously, and I think that is fantastic, but if this awareness of finitude did not exist, none of us would do great things. Why am I going to study now if I can do it in six centuries?”
He was also in the city of Lima presenting the book. In an interview with Manoel Obando of Infobae Peru, said: “Culture gives us a model of happiness. ‘You have to be happy, you have to enjoy and upload a photo to Instagram for you to be happy.’ But many studies have shown that the last social media post of a person who has just committed suicide is a happy post. As if it were a sin to be sad.”
Gabriel Rolon He is 61 years old and has a long career, not only in literature, but also in the media. He participated in several radio and television programs, such as the now classic Revenge will be terribleconducted by Alejandro Dolina. As for books, more than a dozen have already been published. They stand out Couch stories, The sufferers, Encounters, The absent voice, The price of passion and The duelall with thousands and thousands of copies sold.
