The True Want for Happiness

            I just finished the book "The Lady in the Car with the Glasses and a Gun." The book, while somewhat stodgy at first, turned into a delicious thriller with twists and turns so sudden that it was almost impossible to see them coming and an ending that both satiated and hungry the reader. When I last left Dany Longo she had been mysteriously attacked, but that was all that was wrong. But we learn that was only a chip of the iceberg that was her problems on the journey. It seems that wherever Dany goes, people believe they have seen her before, that she has already visited all of the places she's been: the gas station, the Renaissance hotel: the beach: even the cafe she stopped to get an espresso at. But that's not all, Dany opens the trunk to find a dead body of a notorious womanizer of Paris wrapped in a rug and deposited with a gun. Dany attempts to solve the mystery of the man's murder and her apparent escapades about France. When she stumbles upon the answer, her boss attempts to kill her and it is revealed that is was he and his wife who killed the man and attempted to pin it on Dany, so convincingly that Dany believes she did it. Dany hears his story, leaves and gets married to a man in England.
                 The ending seemed strange to me, after all of Dany's adventures, her mental instability and mania: her constant desire to be on her own, how could she just settle down and marry someone? How could her weekend of paranoia and thrills not affect her? But then I realized that the trip was what Dany needed to move on from her "just there" state of being perennially worried for no reason. The trip's insanity was the climax of her madness, the thing that pushed her to the edge. If she had submitted to the mystery and accepted her apparent guilt for the murder and hide the body away, she never would have moved on from the horrible monotony her life held before. By solving the mystery she took an active role against being the victim of circumstance as she had before (her parents death, her lack of funds, her lack of love) and her life turned out much differently. This led her to happiness in the end, as she passed the test of being passive and lacking any zeal for life (as she had been) or being actively involved in her life, not just accepting what was given.
               To conclude, in order for Dany to settle down, and be seemingly "normal." She had to confront the thing about herself that was holding herself back in a finite and important way. She was tested on whether she truly wanted to be happy and, passing this, got everything she wanted.