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Is Beauty Good
"By not hurrying, by listening to each voice, almost speaking each word, a kind of world, absolutely solid yet always withheld from our gaze, makes itself felt. This book had an effect on me which was different from that of any other book I have ever read. It is a rare achievement, one to be treasured."
- Gabriel Josipovici
"It is a beautiful work...is says a great deal about the world we live in...more life-like and more alive than most fiction."
- Michael Hamburger.
RB: "I remember that the writing of Is Beauty Good amused me. My pleasure in German literature was in full flood. I don’t know whether you noticed in the first chapter a small figure at the foot of the Berlin wall, like a small figure in a large painting? That is my only cameo appearance in my own fiction. In Dreaming of Dead People I’d done what painters had long been free to do – a study of the human figure – but which, in 1979 (superseded by the new edition, Serpent’s Tail 1989), still roused some readers to degrees of shock, disgust, or lasciviousness. Is Beauty Good was inspired by landscape. I’d lost my heart to the mountains of Südtirol – the Italian Alto Adige. The first part was written over a few weeks in summer, during my next visit to the then West Berlin, when the Literararisches Colloquium was kind enough to let me stay in the house with its garden at the edge of the Wannsee – Kleist had killed himself just up the road. The third part, in my subsidised flat in West Berlin in 1987: the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm gave me a grant for a year. What must be detectable in Is Beauty Good is the mesmerising influence of Thomas Bernhard … from which I only just escaped. I’d been reading Beethoven’s conversation books. I’d heard Gabriel’s lecture A Bird was in the Room (see Writing and the Body, Gabriel Josipovici, Harvester Press 1982) about the resonance of the words Kafka, dying, with TB of the larynx, jotted down to communicate with visitors. In my childhood there had been an old lady for whom everything had to be scribbled out laboriously. So that third part takes the form of a deaf man’s ‘conversation book’, complete with abbreviations and ellipses. The concept has caused many readers to stumble. Yet I feel the book isn’t so very hermetic. What I regret is the use of the impersonal third person. I meant it to supply a distancing, detached feel to the narrative. As soon as I saw it in German translation I knew it had been a mistake, an affectation. In Choosing Spectacles it is reduced … perhaps not enough
- RB
- Gabriel Josipovici
"It is a beautiful work...is says a great deal about the world we live in...more life-like and more alive than most fiction."
- Michael Hamburger.
RB: "I remember that the writing of Is Beauty Good amused me. My pleasure in German literature was in full flood. I don’t know whether you noticed in the first chapter a small figure at the foot of the Berlin wall, like a small figure in a large painting? That is my only cameo appearance in my own fiction. In Dreaming of Dead People I’d done what painters had long been free to do – a study of the human figure – but which, in 1979 (superseded by the new edition, Serpent’s Tail 1989), still roused some readers to degrees of shock, disgust, or lasciviousness. Is Beauty Good was inspired by landscape. I’d lost my heart to the mountains of Südtirol – the Italian Alto Adige. The first part was written over a few weeks in summer, during my next visit to the then West Berlin, when the Literararisches Colloquium was kind enough to let me stay in the house with its garden at the edge of the Wannsee – Kleist had killed himself just up the road. The third part, in my subsidised flat in West Berlin in 1987: the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm gave me a grant for a year. What must be detectable in Is Beauty Good is the mesmerising influence of Thomas Bernhard … from which I only just escaped. I’d been reading Beethoven’s conversation books. I’d heard Gabriel’s lecture A Bird was in the Room (see Writing and the Body, Gabriel Josipovici, Harvester Press 1982) about the resonance of the words Kafka, dying, with TB of the larynx, jotted down to communicate with visitors. In my childhood there had been an old lady for whom everything had to be scribbled out laboriously. So that third part takes the form of a deaf man’s ‘conversation book’, complete with abbreviations and ellipses. The concept has caused many readers to stumble. Yet I feel the book isn’t so very hermetic. What I regret is the use of the impersonal third person. I meant it to supply a distancing, detached feel to the narrative. As soon as I saw it in German translation I knew it had been a mistake, an affectation. In Choosing Spectacles it is reduced … perhaps not enough
- RB
- GenresFiction
122 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
35 people want to read
About the author
Rosalind Belben
9 books12 followersRosalind Belben is an English novelist. She was born in 1941 in Dorset where she now lives. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her novel Our Horses in Egypt won the James Tait Black Award in 2007. Among her other books are Bogies, Reuben Little Hero, The Limit, Dreaming of Dead People, and Hound Music.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 1, 2014
More a collection of short pieces than a novel, though there are clear thematic links between them. Some parts are more Bernhardian than others, and her prose-craft remains impeccable. Some interesting investigation of the Nature/Beauty/Goodness issues, though this element is occasionally overdone. Worth reading, however, for many of the short sections which, on their own, contain some excellent writing.
"The third child, says the peasant in broad dialect, has a little tricycle, a toy thing for very small children, and he goes pedalling off on it, for mile and miles, at the age of three, when no one is looking, he has the urge to pedal miles, to the mountains, at the age of three, on a baby's tricycle; and the old dog always goes with him; I meet him miles from home, pedalling along like a fury, and the dog running alongside, he slips out when on one is looking, and the dog like his shadow, people say she protects him, has it in her head to protect him, I don't know so much; and I meet him out in the country and I call to him, Franzi, was machst du hier?, wohin?, and he smiles radiantly, not naughtily or guiltily, and says in his baby voice, bicycling, to the mountains he says, and the old dog too; and I try to explain it's dangerous, he's too young to be out in the country miles from home alone, and he smiles, and smiles, and there's no stopping him; it's my wheel, he says, my wheel is hungry, it eats and I can't stop it, it's terribly hungry, me and the dog takes it out to eat; and he waves to me, cheerfully he waves to me, a three-year-old, and the hair busy in the wind, and his baby arms poised on the rotten handlebars as if he was in a race, puffing and serious, and the dog's flanks thin and shadowy beside him, the dog not saying a thing to me; and I call, come with me, Franzi, you and the dog have a lift with me; and he says, don't forget the boy's Radl, his little tricycle, his insatiable wheel, don't forget his Radl; he means himself, the boy; how do you keep a child in? I say to his big brother, can't you keep an eye on Franzi, it's dangerous for him to be eaten up by his Radl, and we are all helpless, the child slips away, when no one's looking, he picks his time, what will a child do when he's grown up, that slips off to the mountains on a tiny tricycle, so strong and so willful a baby, insatiable; don't forget my Radl whatever you do, he says, don't leave my Radl here in the road, miles from home, and he smiles with total innocence, total guile."
"The third child, says the peasant in broad dialect, has a little tricycle, a toy thing for very small children, and he goes pedalling off on it, for mile and miles, at the age of three, when no one is looking, he has the urge to pedal miles, to the mountains, at the age of three, on a baby's tricycle; and the old dog always goes with him; I meet him miles from home, pedalling along like a fury, and the dog running alongside, he slips out when on one is looking, and the dog like his shadow, people say she protects him, has it in her head to protect him, I don't know so much; and I meet him out in the country and I call to him, Franzi, was machst du hier?, wohin?, and he smiles radiantly, not naughtily or guiltily, and says in his baby voice, bicycling, to the mountains he says, and the old dog too; and I try to explain it's dangerous, he's too young to be out in the country miles from home alone, and he smiles, and smiles, and there's no stopping him; it's my wheel, he says, my wheel is hungry, it eats and I can't stop it, it's terribly hungry, me and the dog takes it out to eat; and he waves to me, cheerfully he waves to me, a three-year-old, and the hair busy in the wind, and his baby arms poised on the rotten handlebars as if he was in a race, puffing and serious, and the dog's flanks thin and shadowy beside him, the dog not saying a thing to me; and I call, come with me, Franzi, you and the dog have a lift with me; and he says, don't forget the boy's Radl, his little tricycle, his insatiable wheel, don't forget his Radl; he means himself, the boy; how do you keep a child in? I say to his big brother, can't you keep an eye on Franzi, it's dangerous for him to be eaten up by his Radl, and we are all helpless, the child slips away, when no one's looking, he picks his time, what will a child do when he's grown up, that slips off to the mountains on a tiny tricycle, so strong and so willful a baby, insatiable; don't forget my Radl whatever you do, he says, don't leave my Radl here in the road, miles from home, and he smiles with total innocence, total guile."
January 28, 2021
This was a frustrating read. The absence of cohesion (or coherence) between the short pieces and the similarity in their fragmentary internal thought-burps (staccato clauses mauled with commas) rolling along through umpteen unnamed, unidentified, unrelated characters, made bobbing along on the luscious waves of (somewhat) poetical prose impossible. Stylistically, the prose had the choppy brutalism of the harshest Beckett and the kind of vacuous wandering meh-ness of the less pleasant nouveau romanciers of old. Belben’s earlier novel Dreaming of Dead People was pretty stellar.
June 18, 2015
I feel a bit of a fraud giving this book 3 stars - I really wanted to give it two, possibly even less, but I didn't think that was fair as my main problem was that I simply didn't understand it. I was left feeling stupid and missing something. The very short stories that make up this book are "prose poetry", which I usually like, but I simply could get no grasp on this at all - in some cases I couldn't even understand what was going on at all, no matter how slowly I read.
So ... less said the better and time to move on.
(#27 in my Year of Reading Women)
So ... less said the better and time to move on.
(#27 in my Year of Reading Women)
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews