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Is Beauty Good

Is Beauty Good

by Rosalind Belben, introduction by Esther Kinsky

$15.95
$15.95
Available as E-Book International Literature
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“We feel pain, says Fritz, because we need to feel pain, it saves us from being burnt, or hurt, or from walking blindly into danger, breaking a bone; but what does a sense of beauty save us from; what purpose is there in our being coruscated by passing uglinesses; there is little that is moral about beauty; or does it reinforce somehow our notion of moral good: is beauty good?”

Is Beauty Good is a novel populated with voices, each musing, in its own way, on the titular question. In thirty short, self-contained chapters set in places as varied as Berlin trams, English gardens, and the tops of mountains, people talk to silent listeners, engage in soliloquy, or else write down their meditations for a stone-deaf man.

Elegiac and ironic, the novel speaks most hauntingly of the loss of the natural world, which is of course related to the loss of all those senses and faculties of appreciation that make us feel alive. The sheer sensuous force of Rosalind Belben’s prose is on full display in this work of uncommon inventiveness and philosophical potency, which recalls the fictions of Virginia Woolf and Thomas Bernhard.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9798896230717
Pages: 136
Publication Date:

Praise

Deeply strange, uncompromising and extraordinarily powerful.
—Jonathan Buckley, The New Statesman

In language and form, Belben’s writing was like no other, and remains startling.
—Paul Griffiths

If the world includes Rosalind Belben and her words it cannot be considered an altogether regrettable place to be.
—Harry Mathews

For Belben, the dreadful, the unforgettable, the raw, revolting are qualities that bring us to feel equally the marvel that is being alive.... Her books demonstrate that not all fiction has to appeal to that phantom creature 'the common reader' in order to be valuable. Being unappealing—letting the ugly in to work its maleficence at the level of the sentence of a narrative... This has its own vast and life affirming reward.
—Kirsty Gunn, Literary Hub

Belben works her readers harder than many of her contemporaries—but the rewards of reading her, as of reading Proust, are that the work continues to haunt our minds long after we have put it down.
—Philip Terry

A beautiful work ... it says a great deal about the world we live in ... more life-like and more alive than most fiction.
—Michael Hamburger

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