Hector and the Search for Happiness

I was given this book for Christmas from my brilliant and amazing friend, the same friend who’s been recommending all those German authors I've been posting about (ok that's an exaggeration, it's only been two). 

We had watched the movie at the cinema before the Christmas holidays and I enjoyed it so much. Simon Pegg’s in it and so it was obvious that I was going to love it because he’s a great actor and I’m a massive fan. Like seriously, I’ve watched quite a lot of things he’s been in and his TV series, Spaced, is on my top 10 best TV series list.

Anyway, because I liked the film so much (here's the trailer if you're interested), my lovely friend bought the book for me. I started reading it and couldn’t put it down, I managed to finish it in a day. If I’m honest, it’s not that long of a book and the prose is very simple, so it wasn’t much of a challenge to breeze through it. Plus, the plot is very entertaining and it makes for a very enjoyable read. I usually hate (!) reading books after I’ve seen the movie because any surprises within the novel don’t have the same impact because I know they’re going to happen! But, in this case it didn’t really matter that I had already seen the film because the book, as often happens with book to film adaptations, it’s not completely the same as the film. 

The book is about a psychiatrist called Hector who decides to go and travel the world in order to see what makes people happy. He meets a lot of colourful characters and learns a lot about what it means to be truly happy. I don’t think anyone can read this book and NOT have a smile on their face by the time they reach the last page. Even though the writing style is very basic (almost childlike), there is an element of ambiguous-ness. For example, the author, Francois Lelord, doesn’t explicitly mention what religion he's referring to in this excerpt:"Hector asked them what their religion was, and it turned out that it was the same as Hectors! This dated back to the time, long ago, when people of Hector's religion had occupied their islands, because at that time they tended to think that everything belonged to them." I think it's pretty safe to assume that he's talking about Christianity. I found this method of writing to be rather clever and entertaining because it was fun to work out what it was exactly that Lelord was talking about.

What made the whole reading experience even better is that my friend had annotated the copy with her thoughts on certain passages (some of the comments she made are bloody hilarious!), and she had underlined quotes that she thought were the most illuminating. Here are some of the quotes she highlighted which I think are really interesting: 

• "The basic mistake that people make is to think that happiness is the goal." 
• "It's one thing thinking something and another thing knowing it."
• About dictatorships: "Their whole country was like a bad family which didn't look after its children properly."
• "Hector was intelligent but not necessarily smart."
• "Knowing and feeling are two different things, and feeling is what counts."
• "We're very concerned about polluting the air, but not about polluting our children's minds."
• One of the rules I try to live my life by: "Happiness is not attaching too much importance to what other people think." 
• "But that's science: it isn't enough just to think a thing, you must try to verify whether it's true."

So, all in all, I don't think this is the best book I've ever read (or the best book I've read this month even), but it was really lovely and had some truly inspiring and noteworthy messages to share. Best of all, it's always going to remind me of a great and loyal friend (sounds proper cheesy but it's the truth).