Happy Days: Political novel as the practice of reading

This paper explores Srećni dani (Happy Days, 2023) by s Serbian author Srđan Vučinić as a paradigmatic example of a political novel conceived through the practice of reading itself rather than through conventional genre criteria. While structurally ambiguous, classified as a collection of short stories yet received as a novel, it engages deeply with political, historical, and gendered themes through its layered narrative and paratextual elements. Central to the novel is the narrativization of the Yugoslav crisis and wars, which are employed as symbolic frameworks for exploring collective identity, memory, and social disintegration. Through grotesque, posthuman, and dystopian motifs, Happy Days reconstructed the aftermath of national collapse through bodily and emotional experiences. This analysis focuses on the concept of the “collective body” as a site of political, historical, and gendered inscription. Gender, often seemingly absent on the surface, emerges in the process of reception and interpretation, underscoring the novel’s engagement with embodied history, memory politics, and post-human subjectivities. Ultimately, the paper argues that Happy Days exemplifies the political novel not as a fixed literary form but as a relational, interpretative space shaped by reader-text interactions.