Is Beauty Good

by Rosalind Belben

"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.



"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of Dead People I’d done what painters had long been free to do – a study of the human figure – but which, in 1979 (superseded by the new edition, Serpent’s Tail 1989), still roused some readers to degrees of shock, disgust, or lasciviousness.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

Genres: Fiction, Literature

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Rosalind 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.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

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."

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

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)

[james !! · Rating 3 out of 5]

after really enjoying my time with ‘dreaming of dead people’ i’m unfortunately less convinced with this collection of stories. the main reason boils down to it either being completely brilliant or just too abstract to fully pin down.

i think the first 2 parts in this little collection are pretty stellar and completely engaging to read. this weird blend of (mostly) anonymous characters & inanimate objects create a strange & deeply compelling look at humanity through nature. it feels almost weird to explain, but for a good portion of this book there’s this uncanny ability for Belben to pretty much say & go anywhere within the short snippets and strike gold. unfortunately i can’t say the same for the final section. i actually think it opened great with the very broken up english, hard to read but really demanded my attention. however as soon as that style stopped i found the rest of ‘the great white worm’ to be frankly way over my head. i think i’d suggest reading it over the course of a month instead in a few days just to try wrap your head around it!!

still lots to like & love from this, maybe one to revisit for me, pick it up every so often & tackle parts i feel unsure of!

[Ian, etc. · Rating 4 out of 5]

*That’s the trouble the world over, he says. Nobody listens. Nature listens, but nature is helpless to act, nature is at the mercy.*

Desperately, dangerously. One can always cut the flowers. What beauty belongs to them; one can always cut them at the stem. The flower is a song we can kill.

Is beauty good? It is good if we learn it. It is good if we know what we mean by it. If we can get there. Is beauty good only after cutting, or for it? Is it good and the only good to be at the mercy?

Belben is a cutting poet and beauty. Will return to this, better for it, and who knows, *I may catch sight of it, something, again, just as it's slipping away, like an animal, making itself invisible, or the sun, when I'm utterly weary.*

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

|| IS BEAUTY GOOD ||
#gifted @nyrbooks
(Pub Date Aug 4th)
“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?”
~
Rereleased in NYRB Classics edition. The format was very compelling. I loved all the glimpses into these characters voices and thoughts and how by the end they were all harmonized as one. Belben's writing is so original and thought provoking.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

This will be a difficult read for those unacquainted with Belben and her propensity to inhabit the more uninhibited thoughts of ordinary people. These thirty-one short narratives are abrupt, vary widely in style and form, and by the third section, the prose begins to lose shape with the extreme contraction of many words, erratic capitalization, and unique spellings. Many of her characters are odd, with strange fixations, and their monolgues quickly descend into half-coherent ramblings. The thematic connection is the notion of whether beauty is good, but that is a very elastic concept. However, there is true beauty here—not necessarily directly spelled out—in Belben's deeply intuitive engagement with nature and with dogs (and sometimes other creatures). But, as ever, she makes her reader open their mind to see the beauty.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2026/07/27/i-...

[Thomas Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

A complex novel, made up of linked soliloquies that evoke themes such as the destruction of nature, the illogic of war, and the permeability of cultures and boundaries. Not an easy read, but a worthwhile one.

[Sam Dix · Rating 3 out of 5]

Curious little fragments of short stories, loosely in the conversation of the idea of beauty. Occasionally impressionistic, occasionally frustrating.

[Lily Wang · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’d like to see the sun rise day after day & set, before I fall apart