Is Beauty Good by Rosalind Belben

Is Beauty Good by Rosalind Belben

‘That the music may be polyphonic is no grounds for not listening,’ scribbles a man for his stone-deaf friend. In Is Beauty Good there are many such voices. People talk to various listeners, even to silent ones. They talk to themselves, they resort to handwriting. The inanimate too may be granted a whimsical presence: a child’s tricycle, an antique chest. But, witty and ironic, the novel speaks with one voice of the things that speak, and don't speak to us: ‘I drank carrot juice, beetroot juice. Disgusting. It seemed undignified, to be so desperate as to drink beetroot juice. Yet people do it without a second thought.’

It begins in Berlin by the Wall. It ends in Berlin – still before 1989 – in the Tiergarten Zoo, to the boom and roar and moan of animals. More often we find ourselves in mountains or an English garden, in the natural world, the loss of which Is Beauty Good so memorably laments.

Rosalind Belben was born and brought up in Dorset and, after a nomadic life, has again made it her home. A new edition of Dreaming of Dead People has been published by And Other Stories (with Choosing Spectacles forthcoming in the same series). Among her other novels are The Limit, Hound Music and Our Horses in Egypt, which won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2007.

Esther Kinsky grew up by the river Rhine and lived in London for twelve years. She is the author of six volumes of poetry, five novels, numerous essays on language, poetry and translation and three children’s books. She has translated many notable English and Polish authors into German.