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SE NON SAI CHE SEI VIVA
Acclaimed author of 2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas Marie-Helene Bertino's Parakeet is a darkly funny and warm-hearted novel about a young woman whose dead grandmother (in the form of a parakeet) warns her not to marry and sends her out to find an estranged loved one.The week of her wedding, the bride is visited by a bird she recognizes as her dead grandmother because of the cornflower blue line beneath her eyes, her dubious expression, and the way she What is the Internet?Her grandmother is a parakeet. She says not to get married. She Go and find your brother.In the days that follow, the bride's march to the altar becomes a wild and increasingly fragmented, unstable journey that bends toward the surreal and forces her to confront matters long buried.A novel that does justice to the hectic confusion of becoming a woman today, Parakeet asks and begins to answer the essential questions. What do our memories make us? How do we honor our experiences and still become our strongest, truest selves? Who are we responsible for, what do we owe them, and how do we allow them to change?Urgent, strange, warm-hearted, and sly, Parakeet is ribboned with joy, fear, and an inextricable thread of real love. It is a startling, unforgettable, life-embracing exploration of self and connection.
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First published June 2, 2020
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About the author
Marie-Helene Bertino
13 books1,053 followersMarie-Helene Bertino was born and raised in Philadelphia. She is the author of the novels Beautyland (Best Books of 2024 (So Far) NYTimes, TIME Magazine, Esquire, Elle)), Parakeet (NYTimes Editor's Choice) and 2 a.m. at The Cat's Pajamas, and the short story collection Safe as Houses. Awards include The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, The Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Mississippi Review Prize, The Center for Fiction NYC Emerging Writers Fellowship and The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Electric Literature, Granta, Guernica, BOMB, among many others. She is the recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook Writers Colony, The Center For Fiction NYC, and Sewanee Writers Conference, where she was the Walter E. Dakin fellow. In June 2021, "Disrupting Realism," an online master class and panel she designed to make graduate level resources available at no charge, was attended by 1,300 people. She has taught in the Creative Writing programs of NYU, The New School, and Institute for American Indian Arts. She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Department at Yale University. More info: www.mariehelenebertino.com
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July 22, 2020I am a fan of Bertino's writing. This novel is imaginative, quirky, awkward, funny, at times moving, always strange. The first half is stronger than the second half. Hard to get into a relaxed reading experience but that's not a bad thing.
July 13, 2020
“Parakeet” was an utterly engrossing story.
NO SPOILERS... 🦜
....personally I recommend going in blind. It sure worked for me.
The shrewd wit, narrative energy, humor and seriousness was endlessly inventive.
I was hooked with the first sentence! Since it’s too good .... I won’t include it. Can’t imagine anyone falling asleep though.
“Bride” ( our protagonist was referred to as ‘The Bride’), was getting married in a week.
She was unsure - unsettled- unhappy - lonely - but....determined to ‘just-do-it’....get on with it....
marry ‘The Groom’....hoping life wouldn’t be gloomy.
Oh boy... sounded like a disaster ‘red flag’ to me.
The week before the wedding a tenacious parakeet visits ‘Bride’....
It’s Bride’s dead grandmother....(Bride would’ve recognize her from anywhere....in any shape or form).
Ha, and like all wise grandmothers...’Grandma Parakeet’ had some advice ( rather clear threats that would have severe consequences should ‘Bride’ not do what the wise ‘Gram-Parakeet’ said to do).
A message came to ‘Bride’ in the form of bird poop on her wedding dress.
I was pulled in many directions between comedy and tragedy. There was pain, joy, compelling characters, surprises, shock, occasional beauty, incredible intelligence, and a tragic depiction of a world that was happy to sacrifice its weakest link.
Lots to think about...
Soooo creative, brilliant, and enjoyable!
This one simple sentence .... symbolizes much of the unyielding truth of this entire fable to me:
“The problem with the room was that it was gorgeous and shining but people were missing”.
‘The Bride’ was sad in a happy place! 🙁
Cleverly comic to starkly surreal...
....an achingly idiosyncratic story.
I’d like to think that my parakeets... Lil & Phil would have loved this story too!
Loved it....
Looking forward to reading other books by Marie-Helene Bertino. 😊📚
NO SPOILERS... 🦜
....personally I recommend going in blind. It sure worked for me.
The shrewd wit, narrative energy, humor and seriousness was endlessly inventive.
I was hooked with the first sentence! Since it’s too good .... I won’t include it. Can’t imagine anyone falling asleep though.
“Bride” ( our protagonist was referred to as ‘The Bride’), was getting married in a week.
She was unsure - unsettled- unhappy - lonely - but....determined to ‘just-do-it’....get on with it....
marry ‘The Groom’....hoping life wouldn’t be gloomy.
Oh boy... sounded like a disaster ‘red flag’ to me.
The week before the wedding a tenacious parakeet visits ‘Bride’....
It’s Bride’s dead grandmother....(Bride would’ve recognize her from anywhere....in any shape or form).
Ha, and like all wise grandmothers...’Grandma Parakeet’ had some advice ( rather clear threats that would have severe consequences should ‘Bride’ not do what the wise ‘Gram-Parakeet’ said to do).
A message came to ‘Bride’ in the form of bird poop on her wedding dress.
I was pulled in many directions between comedy and tragedy. There was pain, joy, compelling characters, surprises, shock, occasional beauty, incredible intelligence, and a tragic depiction of a world that was happy to sacrifice its weakest link.
Lots to think about...
Soooo creative, brilliant, and enjoyable!
This one simple sentence .... symbolizes much of the unyielding truth of this entire fable to me:
“The problem with the room was that it was gorgeous and shining but people were missing”.
‘The Bride’ was sad in a happy place! 🙁
Cleverly comic to starkly surreal...
....an achingly idiosyncratic story.
I’d like to think that my parakeets... Lil & Phil would have loved this story too!
Loved it....
Looking forward to reading other books by Marie-Helene Bertino. 😊📚
June 26, 2021
A masterclass in free-wheeling experimental writing, with a big heart and a lot of humor.
May 7, 2020
5+ out of 5.
Absolutely fantastic. As my podcast co-host called it, a sort of "phantasmagorical Mrs. Dalloway" -- weird things happen to a woman as she's approaching her wedding, but weird things have been happening her whole life too. I don't even really know how to start talking about/describing this book, beyond that. It's so strange, it's so poignant, it is so smart and messy and wonderful. You could call it a great examination of a woman's mental breakdown and recovery, but you could also call it a deconstruction of the wedding industrial complex from a lost season of TWIN PEAKS.
Just fantastic, and unlike anything else I've read in a long time. Bertino has delivered her strange sophomore novel and it is fucking stellar.
Absolutely fantastic. As my podcast co-host called it, a sort of "phantasmagorical Mrs. Dalloway" -- weird things happen to a woman as she's approaching her wedding, but weird things have been happening her whole life too. I don't even really know how to start talking about/describing this book, beyond that. It's so strange, it's so poignant, it is so smart and messy and wonderful. You could call it a great examination of a woman's mental breakdown and recovery, but you could also call it a deconstruction of the wedding industrial complex from a lost season of TWIN PEAKS.
Just fantastic, and unlike anything else I've read in a long time. Bertino has delivered her strange sophomore novel and it is fucking stellar.
June 18, 2020
From the very first paragraph of Parakeet, I knew I was in for an exhilarating reading experience.
Take a look: “One week before my wedding day, upon returning to my hotel room with a tube of borrowed toothpaste, I find a small bird waiting inside the area called the antechamber and know within moments it is my grandmother. I recognize the glittering, hematite eyes, the expression of cunning disapproval.”
Wow! Where does an inventive and imaginative author go from here? As it turns out, very far. Our ethnically ambiguous narrator, referred to as The Bride, is about to marry an elementary school principal, predictably titled The Groom (and that’s the only predicable part of this stunning novel). But as the wedding date approaches, her psychological landscape begins to become increasingly fragmented and fantastical.
Our Bride, we learn, is defined by traumatizing events and invisible injuries. And as she bravely forges forward in her quest for understanding and resolution, we meet some of the most quixotic characters and creatures that have graced the pages of a novel. And that includes parakeet-costumed performers who recreate the Bride’s life and s suited-up blogging reptile at a diner at the end of the world.
If all this sounds far out and inaccessible: it is not. There is a definite arc to the novel, which also includes a complicated relationship with her estranged brother, a cold and unloving mother, and a best friend who may not actually fit that definition. The themes are universal: confronting the demons that plague us, recognizing that our human identity is fluid and simultaneously holds may parts of us, and recognizing that like Humpty Dumpty, we can take a great fall and be glued back together again.
Ultimately, the question asked is: how do you join yourself to another when you can’t even join together the disparate parts of yourself? The book is must-reading and I give my sincere thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for enabling me to be an early reader of Parakeet in exchange for an honest review
June 22, 2020
A surreal little novel that flits and flirts with themes of human transformations, both voluntary and involuntary, in response to forces including physical and psychological trauma and familial and societal expectations. Plot-wise (and only very loosely so), these themes are explored as we follow along with the protagonist’s interior monologue while making her preparations during several days leading up to her wedding, which she is feeling exceedingly ambivalent about, and reflecting on how she has arrived at this point.
The (only fleeting, it turns out: More Parakeet!) titular parakeet/grandmother episode that launches the novel is but one, and for me the most promising, warm, and compelling/moving, in a number of increasingly less cute and feathery dissociative episodes the extremely unreliably-narrating protagonist (herself a survivor of violent and family/generational trauma, who also works with traumatic brain injury survivors) experiences as she seems to undergo an - albeit ultimately transformative - period of decompensation and depersonalization/derealization as the wedding approaches.
In particular, I was thrown off the rails initially when the narrator very literally and loathingly confronts the fear of becoming her mother, and then some whole thing with meeting up with a past paramour (maybe?) and again, quite literally seeing herself in his current partner? I found this all about as destabilizing as the narrator did, and it was hard to come back from the parakeet delusion and skip around to these and even more metaphorical manifestations of her inner turmoil along with everything else going on in the book, including but not limited to filling in family and protagonist backstories and the wedding prep that haplessly but inexorably proceeds. It sort of felt like a video game ...written by Virginia Woolf. Now, that sounds kind of awesome to me, but still I struggled. Maybe I wanted more of a Scott Pilgrim approach with a more linear progression through the processing and exorcism of interior demons. But traumatic healing isn’t linear and progressive, but rather episodic, I get it - like braving the floor periodically crumbling under your feet (again, a metaphor this narrator also literally, repeatedly experiences) and sending you plummeting stories, like a game of Chutes and Ladders and Landmines.
Ultimately, there is a hint of hope that the protagonist has achieved some integration of her trauma, and has very symbolically repaired some critical family relationships - I did really appreciate the fractured sibling relationship(s) and reunion(s) presented here - but, as is often the case with traumatic healing itself, it’s a pretty arduous and claustrophobic reading journey to get there. There is an over-reliance in the novel on another metaphor of a hotel elevator that keeps getting stubbornly stuck between floors - sometimes as welcome refuge, sometimes as obstacle or trap - and spending so much time lodged in this extremely isolated and disconnected protagonist’s head, wrestling with so much fear and mistrust of both self and others and thus unable to progress in either direction, really brought to life that elevator jam feeling. As an illustration of disorganized attachment, the novel succeeds, but this also impacts the reading experience.
I really, really expected this novel to work for me in a Mrs. Dalloway kind of fashion, and it sometimes worked for me on a Crying of Lot 49, seemingly-fool’s-errand-puzzle-solving level, but alas - for me it just did not quite all hang together somehow in the end. It may well be a worthwhile and successful reading and writing experience...but just not one I wanted, at least not right now. I know others have truly loved this, so I’m guessing it’s a case of “it’s not you, it’s me,” or “right novel, but wrong time.” I guess I’d say this was much heavier going than expected, or than the quirky titular parakeet hallucinatory episode implied, and I just wasn’t fully prepared for a grinding haul about the burdensome and lonely process of healing from complex PTSD, livened as it was by the too occasional squawk of dark humor. Bertino is undoubtedly a gifted, often poetic writer, and so I urge you to read the novel and ignore my impressions - possibly skewed as the narrator’s herself - if its description sounds remotely appealing to you!
The (only fleeting, it turns out: More Parakeet!) titular parakeet/grandmother episode that launches the novel is but one, and for me the most promising, warm, and compelling/moving, in a number of increasingly less cute and feathery dissociative episodes the extremely unreliably-narrating protagonist (herself a survivor of violent and family/generational trauma, who also works with traumatic brain injury survivors) experiences as she seems to undergo an - albeit ultimately transformative - period of decompensation and depersonalization/derealization as the wedding approaches.
In particular, I was thrown off the rails initially when the narrator very literally and loathingly confronts the fear of becoming her mother, and then some whole thing with meeting up with a past paramour (maybe?) and again, quite literally seeing herself in his current partner? I found this all about as destabilizing as the narrator did, and it was hard to come back from the parakeet delusion and skip around to these and even more metaphorical manifestations of her inner turmoil along with everything else going on in the book, including but not limited to filling in family and protagonist backstories and the wedding prep that haplessly but inexorably proceeds. It sort of felt like a video game ...written by Virginia Woolf. Now, that sounds kind of awesome to me, but still I struggled. Maybe I wanted more of a Scott Pilgrim approach with a more linear progression through the processing and exorcism of interior demons. But traumatic healing isn’t linear and progressive, but rather episodic, I get it - like braving the floor periodically crumbling under your feet (again, a metaphor this narrator also literally, repeatedly experiences) and sending you plummeting stories, like a game of Chutes and Ladders and Landmines.
Ultimately, there is a hint of hope that the protagonist has achieved some integration of her trauma, and has very symbolically repaired some critical family relationships - I did really appreciate the fractured sibling relationship(s) and reunion(s) presented here - but, as is often the case with traumatic healing itself, it’s a pretty arduous and claustrophobic reading journey to get there. There is an over-reliance in the novel on another metaphor of a hotel elevator that keeps getting stubbornly stuck between floors - sometimes as welcome refuge, sometimes as obstacle or trap - and spending so much time lodged in this extremely isolated and disconnected protagonist’s head, wrestling with so much fear and mistrust of both self and others and thus unable to progress in either direction, really brought to life that elevator jam feeling. As an illustration of disorganized attachment, the novel succeeds, but this also impacts the reading experience.
I really, really expected this novel to work for me in a Mrs. Dalloway kind of fashion, and it sometimes worked for me on a Crying of Lot 49, seemingly-fool’s-errand-puzzle-solving level, but alas - for me it just did not quite all hang together somehow in the end. It may well be a worthwhile and successful reading and writing experience...but just not one I wanted, at least not right now. I know others have truly loved this, so I’m guessing it’s a case of “it’s not you, it’s me,” or “right novel, but wrong time.” I guess I’d say this was much heavier going than expected, or than the quirky titular parakeet hallucinatory episode implied, and I just wasn’t fully prepared for a grinding haul about the burdensome and lonely process of healing from complex PTSD, livened as it was by the too occasional squawk of dark humor. Bertino is undoubtedly a gifted, often poetic writer, and so I urge you to read the novel and ignore my impressions - possibly skewed as the narrator’s herself - if its description sounds remotely appealing to you!
January 3, 2025
We all know how the thought process works.
One thought leads to another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, eternity.
Before you know it you lose perspective as to what thought brought all these other random/trivial thoughts on and what you were thinking about to begin with and then it begins again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, eternity.
That's this book.
Bride is getting married.
We know not her name.
Her family is dysfunctional, whose isn't.
We know all their names.
Her dead grandmother visits her as a parakeet and tells Bride to find her estranged brother.
The parakeet poops on the Brides wedding dress.
The Bride lives in her mother's body for an afternoon.
There may be more to the story but I had to wade through countless ideas that lead to that random thought process that I mentioned earlier.
By the time Bride was done thinking trival thoughts, I had forgotten her original thought.
It made my head spin and I'm exhausted.
This is someone else's daydream and I'm privy to every trivial thought/illusion/delusion that the Bride thinks/thought, again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, eternity.
One would think she's neurotic.
But we all do it.
My stream of consciousness is more than enough for me.
I'll just stick in my own head with all those thoughts that morph into the endlessness of my mind, again, and again, and again, and again, and again and again, eternity and call it a day.
I'm done thinking thoughts.....which brings me to another thought...........
One thought leads to another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, eternity.
Before you know it you lose perspective as to what thought brought all these other random/trivial thoughts on and what you were thinking about to begin with and then it begins again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, eternity.
That's this book.
Bride is getting married.
We know not her name.
Her family is dysfunctional, whose isn't.
We know all their names.
Her dead grandmother visits her as a parakeet and tells Bride to find her estranged brother.
The parakeet poops on the Brides wedding dress.
The Bride lives in her mother's body for an afternoon.
There may be more to the story but I had to wade through countless ideas that lead to that random thought process that I mentioned earlier.
By the time Bride was done thinking trival thoughts, I had forgotten her original thought.
It made my head spin and I'm exhausted.
This is someone else's daydream and I'm privy to every trivial thought/illusion/delusion that the Bride thinks/thought, again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, eternity.
One would think she's neurotic.
But we all do it.
My stream of consciousness is more than enough for me.
I'll just stick in my own head with all those thoughts that morph into the endlessness of my mind, again, and again, and again, and again, and again and again, eternity and call it a day.
I'm done thinking thoughts.....which brings me to another thought...........
June 9, 2020
This new release received high marks from many "advanced copy" readers. The story line sounded a bit quirky, but fun. A nice summer read. UGH! IMHO, it was nothing more than page after page of insane rants. Psychotic storyline that was impossible to follow. Quite possibly the worst book I've ever read. The one saving grace was brevity...only 224 pages. Now that I I've got that off my chest...bub-bye, parakeet...fly away now!
May 23, 2020
The Bride awakens, four days before the wedding, in a luxury Inn on, not in, Long Island. What follows is her journey to the altar and beyond, with her history particularly the root of her traumas, spooling out in a precise, measured way. Marie-Helene Bertino is an amazing writer. I remember being blown away by her short stories, but this novel is in a class by itself. There is so much fine writing with such acute observation that it's difficult to pick an example: ("With a gaze, she could lift me older." "...like every night is Saturday night. But most of life is Wednesday afternoon, and no one thinks that's meaningful.") I'll just stop with those two since I could plant quotes from every page and still not do her credit. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to read go her first novel which I somehow missed.
July 11, 2020
If you can imagine "Runaway Bride" written by Charlie Kaufman, then you will love this book. And if that doesn't work for you, come for the magic that is Bertino on the sentence level. Case in point: "Over the hospital's roof, an unfair expanse of stars." Bertino, as ever, writes about longing and hurt in such beautiful ways— and so uniquely— that the hurt just hurts so good. This story about a reluctant bride who is starting to realize the erasure of self she is participating in by getting married to an "okay" kind of partner a week before her wedding was right up my reading alley as I love books that interrogate the value of monogamy and marriage . Highly recommend.
June 13, 2020
The narrator of this surrealistic novel is a 36-year-old woman on the verge of marrying a man she does not love. Her long dead grandmother comes back in the form of a smart-aleck bird and requests that the bride visit her estranged brother before she takes her wedding vows. Apparently, the bird is not too supportive of the upcoming marriage because she defecates all over the wedding dress before flying off.
Her mother is a nightmare and Rose, her maid-of-honor is not much better. Our neurotic bride’s job is to write case histories of victims with closed-head injuries for an injury attorney. Having suffered a disfiguring injury herself, she suffers PTSD-like dreams that float into her continuous stream of consciousness reality.
Bertino’s style of writing is lyrical and sharp-witted. It is surprisingly grounded given that the plot also includes shape-shifting and Shakespearean-like gender confusion. Oh yes, be prepared for a multitude of bird metaphors. Recommend this quirky tale.
Her mother is a nightmare and Rose, her maid-of-honor is not much better. Our neurotic bride’s job is to write case histories of victims with closed-head injuries for an injury attorney. Having suffered a disfiguring injury herself, she suffers PTSD-like dreams that float into her continuous stream of consciousness reality.
Bertino’s style of writing is lyrical and sharp-witted. It is surprisingly grounded given that the plot also includes shape-shifting and Shakespearean-like gender confusion. Oh yes, be prepared for a multitude of bird metaphors. Recommend this quirky tale.
July 7, 2020
I feel like this is one of those books that you have to be in the right place in your life to understand, and I’m just not there. The book is wonderfully written, employing the poetic style of imagination in droves to get the point across. Sometimes it is hard to follow, because it is depicting the nervous breakdown that the main character is experiencing as part of a midlife, getting married, crisis. So much of the story is wonderfully bizarre. There is a part that is unnecessarily redundant, which did take me out of the story a little bit, and some of the parts could have, maybe, been in a different order. It’s a good book, I just didn’t connect with it, and in the end that made me wonder when it was going to end even while only half way through. Sadly, I can only give it 3 stars.
July 22, 2020
I won this book through a Goodreads giveaway. Many thanks to the sponsor and the publisher for this opportunity.
I really wanted to like Marie-Helene Bertino's Parakeet, but I just... couldn't. I started reading this book thinking that its magical realism would resemble something more akin to works by Jess Kidd, which are cohesive, clever, sparkling, and extremely well-written. Unfortunately, Parakeet is none of the above.
The thing that bothered me the most was that the premise sounds intensely comical: a woman's grandmother comes to deliver a warning about her impending marriage in the form of a parakeet? Fantastic! However, the book did not deliver at all, and was quite a dry, humorless read as a whole. Several wild events plague the main character as she prepares for her upcoming nuptials, and while some of them are interesting (she quite literally transforms into her mother for a day, harping on the old idea that all women eventually become their mothers), others are just plain dull. The plot wasn't as tight and funny as I expected it to be, so this one just really missed the mark.
I really didn't want this book to be a one-and-done novel, but alas, I highly doubt I will ever read it again. The cover art promised something much more entertaining than what was inside, and the attached blurb is deceptive and disappointing. Very few characters are remotely tolerable, so I had a tough time empathizing with them throughout the story, even when it was clear I was supposed to care. I'm sad that this book was ultimately so forgettable, but such is life. On to the next read.
I really wanted to like Marie-Helene Bertino's Parakeet, but I just... couldn't. I started reading this book thinking that its magical realism would resemble something more akin to works by Jess Kidd, which are cohesive, clever, sparkling, and extremely well-written. Unfortunately, Parakeet is none of the above.
The thing that bothered me the most was that the premise sounds intensely comical: a woman's grandmother comes to deliver a warning about her impending marriage in the form of a parakeet? Fantastic! However, the book did not deliver at all, and was quite a dry, humorless read as a whole. Several wild events plague the main character as she prepares for her upcoming nuptials, and while some of them are interesting (she quite literally transforms into her mother for a day, harping on the old idea that all women eventually become their mothers), others are just plain dull. The plot wasn't as tight and funny as I expected it to be, so this one just really missed the mark.
I really didn't want this book to be a one-and-done novel, but alas, I highly doubt I will ever read it again. The cover art promised something much more entertaining than what was inside, and the attached blurb is deceptive and disappointing. Very few characters are remotely tolerable, so I had a tough time empathizing with them throughout the story, even when it was clear I was supposed to care. I'm sad that this book was ultimately so forgettable, but such is life. On to the next read.
November 21, 2020
You'd normally think of the time leading up to a wedding as a period of nervous excitement filled with saccharine feeling, but for the unnamed Bride who narrates the novel “Parakeet” by Marie-Helene Bertino it transforms into a surreal journey of self-discovery. She's staying in a luxury inn that is on (not in) Long Island and is meant to be relaxing while making the final preparations for the big day. But in her bedroom she encounters her dead grandmother who appears to her as a parakeet. The bird warns the Bride not to get married and seek out her estranged brother before defecating all over and ruining her wedding dress. There follows a series of increasingly bizarre and unsettling encounters which force the Bride to confront her difficult family and her own traumatic past.
This story is both disturbing and comical in the absurd way that time, space and identity become distorted. Corridors and elevators warp and deliver the Bride into strange new areas. People she encounters are sometimes like a troubling mirror image and other times embody something significant about the Bride's past. A woman she buys a replacement second-hand wedding dress from bears a marked resemblance to her. She witnesses the production of a play written by her brother which recreates an altered version of her past. The spirit of her living mother seems to take possession of her body at one point. Another wedding plays out adjacent to her own in the same venue. Yet, while these experiences are undeniably odd, the narrator navigates them as if she's accustomed to a haunted existence. Since living through a violent tragedy she's discovered “The mean trick of trauma is that like a play it has no past tense. It is always happening.” She's trapped in a kind of hellish present where the past doesn't allow her to progress in ways that are either expected or desired.
Read my full review of Parakeet by Marie-Helene Bertino on LonesomeReader
This story is both disturbing and comical in the absurd way that time, space and identity become distorted. Corridors and elevators warp and deliver the Bride into strange new areas. People she encounters are sometimes like a troubling mirror image and other times embody something significant about the Bride's past. A woman she buys a replacement second-hand wedding dress from bears a marked resemblance to her. She witnesses the production of a play written by her brother which recreates an altered version of her past. The spirit of her living mother seems to take possession of her body at one point. Another wedding plays out adjacent to her own in the same venue. Yet, while these experiences are undeniably odd, the narrator navigates them as if she's accustomed to a haunted existence. Since living through a violent tragedy she's discovered “The mean trick of trauma is that like a play it has no past tense. It is always happening.” She's trapped in a kind of hellish present where the past doesn't allow her to progress in ways that are either expected or desired.
Read my full review of Parakeet by Marie-Helene Bertino on LonesomeReader
September 9, 2021
the kind you inhale in a single sitting—good writing, gets into your head, you get into character's head, etc
4.5 stars
4.5 stars
December 30, 2019
Received a prepublication copy of Parakeet. Genius crafting of a very compelling story laced with brilliant ideas of things that I reread and savored for the unexpected honest wisdom. There were heavy moments sprinkled with a sweet humorous thread that offers the reader a rich and intriguing today story. Bertino is a master storyteller.
June 30, 2020
you know when you finish a book, and you’ve read the acknowledgments, and the author bio, you still turn the few blank pages because you just sat with something special and don’t want it to end? that was this book for me. the closest thing to a beating human heart I’ve read this year.
November 7, 2020
Parakeet is a bizarre and beautiful little gem of a novel. It’s one of those books that cling to you and make it hard to start reading something new.
I'm trying to find a way to describe it without using the label "magical realism" because I've never liked magical realism, but I mean, this story opens a week before the narrator's wedding when her late grandma shows up in her hotel room. As a parakeet. Later,
Okay, but wait. I could also describe it like this: The narrator is getting married -- but isn't sure she wants to. You recognize her uncertainty before she does. What the bride is really grasping for is a closeness, an intimacy she feels she has lost -- or never quite had in the way she thought she did -- with
And overshadowing all of this is All the threads knot together here.
Ah, but none of that sounds funny, and this novel is laugh out loud funny. You're so distracted by the dark humor and the surreal moments that it's startling when you suddenly find yourself in tears.
Oof. Let me try one more time. On the morning of her wedding, the bride buys a bouquet of peonies at a Shop and Save. She practices saying, "I'm so, so, so excited." While checking out, a distracted clerk tells her to enjoy, and the bride reflects:
I'm trying to find a way to describe it without using the label "magical realism" because I've never liked magical realism, but I mean, this story opens a week before the narrator's wedding when her late grandma shows up in her hotel room. As a parakeet. Later,
Okay, but wait. I could also describe it like this: The narrator is getting married -- but isn't sure she wants to. You recognize her uncertainty before she does. What the bride is really grasping for is a closeness, an intimacy she feels she has lost -- or never quite had in the way she thought she did -- with
And overshadowing all of this is All the threads knot together here.
Ah, but none of that sounds funny, and this novel is laugh out loud funny. You're so distracted by the dark humor and the surreal moments that it's startling when you suddenly find yourself in tears.
Oof. Let me try one more time. On the morning of her wedding, the bride buys a bouquet of peonies at a Shop and Save. She practices saying, "I'm so, so, so excited." While checking out, a distracted clerk tells her to enjoy, and the bride reflects:
Those of us jumpy, sensitive, injured, maligned, gaslit as shit, disappeared, panicky, bullied, skin-thin, hyperspecific, de-spined, poorly drugged, weak-willed, fetishized, micro-assaulted, truck-dragged, browbeat insomniacs with unfair bowels and role models, life-ruining kink addictions, and piss-poor familial connections, haremed and hoovered, sealed screaming into closets and shoved under love seats find it hard enough to ease our scraped brains into the compact-only parking spot at the Shop and Save let alone into anything resembling peace without someone threatening, Enjoy!
I match her blankness. "Thank you."
December 18, 2020
Em Parakeet, de Marie-Helene Bertino, tudo começa com um periquito entrando no quarto de uma mulher que vai se casar dali a uma semana, e conversando com ela, dizendo que é sua avó, e, mais tarde, pedindo para a protagonista encontrar o irmão, com quem rompeu os laços. A partir dessa premissa surreal, o romance acompanha uma semana na vida dessa protagonista, suas incerteza a respeito do matrimônio, e a jornada em busca do irmão dramaturgo, que transformou sua família numa peça de sucesso.
Tudo funciona muito bem por causa do olhar cínico e irônico da autora. Há muito humor a partir do absurdo da premissa, mas também é um romance bastante melancólico sobre a conexão com o passado e a aceitação daquilo em que nos transformamos. A personagem tem uma grande surpresa ao encontrar o irmão, e, vendo-o tão seguro de si em suas mudanças, ela cogita por que não mudar ela mesma? E isso a ajuda a lidar com o casamento pelo qual está em constante estado de negação. A combinação de realismo e fantasia traz novas camadas à narrativa, na qual elementos que soariam forçados em outros livros são completamente naturalizados. Bertino escreve muito bem, num fluxo constante repleto alegrias e tristezas – como na vida.
Tudo funciona muito bem por causa do olhar cínico e irônico da autora. Há muito humor a partir do absurdo da premissa, mas também é um romance bastante melancólico sobre a conexão com o passado e a aceitação daquilo em que nos transformamos. A personagem tem uma grande surpresa ao encontrar o irmão, e, vendo-o tão seguro de si em suas mudanças, ela cogita por que não mudar ela mesma? E isso a ajuda a lidar com o casamento pelo qual está em constante estado de negação. A combinação de realismo e fantasia traz novas camadas à narrativa, na qual elementos que soariam forçados em outros livros são completamente naturalizados. Bertino escreve muito bem, num fluxo constante repleto alegrias e tristezas – como na vida.
July 3, 2020
I have the hardest time writing reviews for books that I love. If I’m “meh” or just kind of like a book it’s easier to find things to poke holes in or mention but when you find one of those rare books that you feel like it was written specifically for you it is difficult to explain why. I think the Mira Jacob blurb described this book most accurately by saying it reinvents what you think a novel can do. This book is unlike anything I have read or will ever reading again. The author is so playful with point of view and sequence of events and narrations styles and formatting that you never know what the next chapter is going to hold. It is a fun house mirror of a book. We follow our narrator, The Bride, from a week before her wedding to the morning after her wedding, and in the meantime take jumps back in time to her upbringing, a fallout with her brother, an affair, a tragic injury, and her job, seamlessly. I was delighted to find a chapter where she, literally, inhabits her mother’s body for a period of time which she manages to make both depressing and hilarious. The Bride’s rapport with the concierge at the hotel and with her sibling are by far the highlight of the book. I’m just still, weeks later here, dumbfounded as to how the author pulled it all off in less than 230 pages. This book is a marvel and perfect for anyone who’s willing to suspend a lot of disbelief and buckle up for a wild and weird ride that is unforgettable. Marie-Helene Bertino is a master.
April 5, 2020
I read an arc of this novel and found it to be exactly what I needed and some of what I didn’t know I wanted. Bertino is whimsical and thoughtful all tangled up. The craft of her sentences is deliberate and a noticing eye can tell she masters both lateral and vertical movement in the same paragraph, both grounding us in the physical details and elevating us to higher thought simultaneously.
Her treatment of a trans character is just right. Simone feels inhabited, real, and more than capable of telling us her own story in the few pages spent in her POV. Choosing to write the novel from her sister’s perspective was a careful decision clearly handled with respect.
It’s a beautiful story of sibling relationships, with Bertino’s voice shining right through. A true pleasure to read.
Her treatment of a trans character is just right. Simone feels inhabited, real, and more than capable of telling us her own story in the few pages spent in her POV. Choosing to write the novel from her sister’s perspective was a careful decision clearly handled with respect.
It’s a beautiful story of sibling relationships, with Bertino’s voice shining right through. A true pleasure to read.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 27, 2025
weird and poignant!! it was slippery at times (intentionally) but i liked it a lot
August 8, 2021
Upon finishing Parakeet I sent a message to my friend and said “I think I love it” and then reread the book. I was certain, but I wanted to understand it all, wring it out for every possible interpretation. I don’t think I’ll ever stop rereading or thinking about this book.
The book is about a bride as she navigates her feelings about her upcoming wedding. A week before she is visited in her hotel room by a bird that she immediately recognizes as her grandmother. Her grandmother gives her a warning, a task to complete, asks her “what is this internet?” and then shits on her wedding dress. And the story upends itself from there.
I was originally stuck on this question, “what is the internet?” In an interview that Bo Burnham gave about ‘Inside,’ he says that he was focused on the emotions of being on the internet, “walking through your life and not just living it… Living an experience at the same time hovering behind yourself and watching yourself live that experience.” There’s a kind of heavy disassociation that comes with being online and this book is another brilliant manifestation of that disconnected feeling. The bride even says “I participated in my own subjugation as if watching myself by helicopter.” The book is about the complete unravelling of a mind. Specifically the mind of a woman who has experienced trauma. Time feels different because “the mean trick of trauma is that like a play it has no past tense. It is always happening.” The world goes on, but your heart and mind are collapsing on the inside. Parakeet turns the mind inside out. Erratic, absurd, theatrical things are happening around this woman, some things I still don’t understand, but they all feel absolutely necessary and real.
It’s hard to talk about this book succinctly. Marie-Helene Bertino is just so smart. She plays with time and memory and reality in such a meaningful way. Her writing is captivating, humorous and astute. I want everyone to read this book and I want to talk about it, but I also feel like I’m still hovering behind it, waiting for the curtain to open to reveal even more to me.
The book is about a bride as she navigates her feelings about her upcoming wedding. A week before she is visited in her hotel room by a bird that she immediately recognizes as her grandmother. Her grandmother gives her a warning, a task to complete, asks her “what is this internet?” and then shits on her wedding dress. And the story upends itself from there.
I was originally stuck on this question, “what is the internet?” In an interview that Bo Burnham gave about ‘Inside,’ he says that he was focused on the emotions of being on the internet, “walking through your life and not just living it… Living an experience at the same time hovering behind yourself and watching yourself live that experience.” There’s a kind of heavy disassociation that comes with being online and this book is another brilliant manifestation of that disconnected feeling. The bride even says “I participated in my own subjugation as if watching myself by helicopter.” The book is about the complete unravelling of a mind. Specifically the mind of a woman who has experienced trauma. Time feels different because “the mean trick of trauma is that like a play it has no past tense. It is always happening.” The world goes on, but your heart and mind are collapsing on the inside. Parakeet turns the mind inside out. Erratic, absurd, theatrical things are happening around this woman, some things I still don’t understand, but they all feel absolutely necessary and real.
It’s hard to talk about this book succinctly. Marie-Helene Bertino is just so smart. She plays with time and memory and reality in such a meaningful way. Her writing is captivating, humorous and astute. I want everyone to read this book and I want to talk about it, but I also feel like I’m still hovering behind it, waiting for the curtain to open to reveal even more to me.
January 14, 2020
This uncanny, darkly comic novel was the first book I read in the year of our lord 2020 and let me tell you: it is an absolute gem. Warm and weird, full of brilliant observations and entrancing, unnerving surrealist touches. It begins with a young woman, sitting alone in a hotel room four days before her wedding, whose dead grandmother appears before her in the form of a parrot. The grandmother-parrot warns her not to get married, and commands her to seek out her estranged brother, a reclusive playwright who made his name with a play about his sister’s troubled childhood. In the days that follow, the bride’s journey to the altar becomes a rabbit-hole descent, both bizarre and profound, into both her past and her beguilingly troubled psyche.
May 1, 2020
A really fun book. A week before she is to be married, a woman is confronted with her dead grandmother, now in the form of a parakeet, who implores her to go find her estranged brother. And the novel is off and running from there with great characters and semi-magical occurrences. And line for line, this is one of the most interesting writers I’ve read in some time.
December 31, 2024
What a very odd read. To be fair, life’s interruptions meant I had to put Parakeet down more frequently than I might have otherwise, but still. Glitter and dross.
In the first pages I just sat there, open mouthed, like a cartoon, reeled in like a sea bass, hooked. Such a talent with language, I thought, Bertino places words that have never met each other before back to back in sentences. And stuck in your wedding hotel as an unhappy bride to be, visited by your grandmother, now reincarnated as a wise, occasionally foul mouthed parrot? The parrot Granny insists the bride must find her long estranged brother, admitting that doing so likely won’t help matters much. Delicious story telling.
Alas, we leave the parakeet behind - so soon, not to see her again for far too long - and increasingly the story pools in sorrow and ache. Is this just me, I wondered, reading other reviews. That meeting with used-to-be-best-friend Rose in Union Square, Rose’s impatience and disinterest so painfully acute, more so because it’s barely acknowledged.
“If you can get through your wedding without an existential breakdown, I’m happy for you”, Rose says out of one side of her mouth. You can see her checking her makeup in a compact mirror, longing to get away.
The Groom flits in and out of the pages, unnamed. Fine by me, he’s so remarkably vapid that a name would almost be too much.
The novel continues to unfold haltingly into scenes shifting like flipping through an old viewmaster. Click; Long Island hotel. Click; Union Square, Manhattan. Click; the Queens home of a brain damaged accident patient, the sad walls covered in post it notes, reminders of basic facts. You are here. Only really - nobody is fully there, not the blighted victim, nor our equally scarred narrator, a court appointed case reporter. She seems uniquely wrong for this job.
At its core, Parakeet evolves into the story of this about to be married woman finally reconnecting with a long lost sibling. Yet somehow this felt like a weaker component, the characters in play less authentic than say, that totally believable Granny Budgie. As the plot slipped forward and back in time, my interest and attachment waned. The family history that is intended to be the thread that sews all the pieces together didn’t quite hold up. I’d engage and then slip off, knit one, purl two, nap. Until, Hello! 2/3 of the way through, there’s a truly shocking scene so brilliantly created that I barged back into the story, wide awake and newly fascinated. (A little later, I loved this sentence: “Violence, like snowfall, blunts sound.”)
I can’t say that my sudden return to being riveted by Parakeet sustained. The ending lost me, felt almost like a sitcom writer had stepped in to take over a novel that also held such singular, and welcome, peculiarity. Still, those moments of strangeness and surprise are easily enough for me to look forward to reading more Marie-Helene Bertino (if I liked her voice better than at least a fair amount of the plot, am I doing her a disservice with these rambling notes? It’s an admirable thing to craft sentences that sound new, in this strange world of so many authors, so much noise).
In the first pages I just sat there, open mouthed, like a cartoon, reeled in like a sea bass, hooked. Such a talent with language, I thought, Bertino places words that have never met each other before back to back in sentences. And stuck in your wedding hotel as an unhappy bride to be, visited by your grandmother, now reincarnated as a wise, occasionally foul mouthed parrot? The parrot Granny insists the bride must find her long estranged brother, admitting that doing so likely won’t help matters much. Delicious story telling.
Alas, we leave the parakeet behind - so soon, not to see her again for far too long - and increasingly the story pools in sorrow and ache. Is this just me, I wondered, reading other reviews. That meeting with used-to-be-best-friend Rose in Union Square, Rose’s impatience and disinterest so painfully acute, more so because it’s barely acknowledged.
“If you can get through your wedding without an existential breakdown, I’m happy for you”, Rose says out of one side of her mouth. You can see her checking her makeup in a compact mirror, longing to get away.
The Groom flits in and out of the pages, unnamed. Fine by me, he’s so remarkably vapid that a name would almost be too much.
The novel continues to unfold haltingly into scenes shifting like flipping through an old viewmaster. Click; Long Island hotel. Click; Union Square, Manhattan. Click; the Queens home of a brain damaged accident patient, the sad walls covered in post it notes, reminders of basic facts. You are here. Only really - nobody is fully there, not the blighted victim, nor our equally scarred narrator, a court appointed case reporter. She seems uniquely wrong for this job.
At its core, Parakeet evolves into the story of this about to be married woman finally reconnecting with a long lost sibling. Yet somehow this felt like a weaker component, the characters in play less authentic than say, that totally believable Granny Budgie. As the plot slipped forward and back in time, my interest and attachment waned. The family history that is intended to be the thread that sews all the pieces together didn’t quite hold up. I’d engage and then slip off, knit one, purl two, nap. Until, Hello! 2/3 of the way through, there’s a truly shocking scene so brilliantly created that I barged back into the story, wide awake and newly fascinated. (A little later, I loved this sentence: “Violence, like snowfall, blunts sound.”)
I can’t say that my sudden return to being riveted by Parakeet sustained. The ending lost me, felt almost like a sitcom writer had stepped in to take over a novel that also held such singular, and welcome, peculiarity. Still, those moments of strangeness and surprise are easily enough for me to look forward to reading more Marie-Helene Bertino (if I liked her voice better than at least a fair amount of the plot, am I doing her a disservice with these rambling notes? It’s an admirable thing to craft sentences that sound new, in this strange world of so many authors, so much noise).
March 2, 2021
"Will you be honest with me when I’m present, about me when I’m absent?"
Ostavila sam malo da mi se marinira ova knjiga u podsvesti i nisam odmah htela da pišem recenziju jer a) otišla mi je odmah u omiljene, b) komplikovana je da se objasni.
Ako pročitate samo sinopsis i stignete do onog dela - "preminula baka joj se javila u vidu papagaja" - i pomislite šta je bre ovo, razumem vas u potpunosti. To je bila i moja inicijalna reakcija, ali ne znam šta me je tačno privuklo ovom romanu, imajući u vidu da nisam ljubitelj magičnog realizma. Ovo je nešto sasvim funky fresh i nešto što ne može da se jednostavno smesti u jedan žanr, pa neću to ni pokušavati.
Asocira na Ali Smit, Debru Levi, asocira na sve te romane gde ne znate gde je granica jave, sna, noćne more, toka svesti i sanjarenja na javi. Za divno čudo, konkretni tok radnje postoji, ali protkan scenama koje će vas možda u početku zbuniti, ali sve ima svoj smisao na kraju. Kao Dejvid Linč sa konkretnom porukom. Ima crnog humora, ima feminizma, ima tuge, nade, ima pronalaženja srodnih duša. Ovo je jedna gorko-slatka priča koja je tvrdoglava i čudna, ali je i dalje samo jedna od nas.
Ostavila sam malo da mi se marinira ova knjiga u podsvesti i nisam odmah htela da pišem recenziju jer a) otišla mi je odmah u omiljene, b) komplikovana je da se objasni.
Ako pročitate samo sinopsis i stignete do onog dela - "preminula baka joj se javila u vidu papagaja" - i pomislite šta je bre ovo, razumem vas u potpunosti. To je bila i moja inicijalna reakcija, ali ne znam šta me je tačno privuklo ovom romanu, imajući u vidu da nisam ljubitelj magičnog realizma. Ovo je nešto sasvim funky fresh i nešto što ne može da se jednostavno smesti u jedan žanr, pa neću to ni pokušavati.
Asocira na Ali Smit, Debru Levi, asocira na sve te romane gde ne znate gde je granica jave, sna, noćne more, toka svesti i sanjarenja na javi. Za divno čudo, konkretni tok radnje postoji, ali protkan scenama koje će vas možda u početku zbuniti, ali sve ima svoj smisao na kraju. Kao Dejvid Linč sa konkretnom porukom. Ima crnog humora, ima feminizma, ima tuge, nade, ima pronalaženja srodnih duša. Ovo je jedna gorko-slatka priča koja je tvrdoglava i čudna, ali je i dalje samo jedna od nas.
December 5, 2024
Bertino uses a sweet surrealism to hold the weight of her MC’s personal and familial pain.
September 12, 2023
love love love love love love LOVE
August 18, 2024
3.5 stars
Parakeet started out strong with the bride when, on the week of her wedding, she receives a visit from a bird she feels is her dead grandmother. The parakeet-grandmother drills the bride about her life at present before telling her not to get married and to go find her brother, from whom the bride is estranged.
As the days count down to her wedding, the rest of the week unfolds in and around the mesh overlay of the past she has long avoided. Much of the writing is witty, tender, and empathetic as it explores heavy identity and trauma themes. There is a strong surreal, experimental feel to it — and the disjointed and meandering style increases in intensity and frequency, while simultaneously dipping into intentional confusion. And while I appreciated the style at the beginning, the distinct lack of direction made this feel more like a writing assignment stretched to fit a novel, rather than something with intention from the author.
The novel feels like a deluge of dissociative fugue, overwhelming and fragmented. And with Bertino's skill, this largely worked well. The unnamed narrator was, despite all levels of wackiness and self-delusion, she was pretty fun to get to know. Much of the present-day narrative takes place in a newly renovated, but old-looking hotel on Long Island.
Having loved Bertino's newest novel, Beautyland, I did enjoy seeing some of the same elements explored here, but I think this suffered a bit from a storytelling perspective in that she allowed the core of the novel to wander too far off base before hauling it back for a beat too short. Nevertheless, I look forward to what Bertino does next, and I am going to take a peek at her earlier novel, 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas.
Parakeet started out strong with the bride when, on the week of her wedding, she receives a visit from a bird she feels is her dead grandmother. The parakeet-grandmother drills the bride about her life at present before telling her not to get married and to go find her brother, from whom the bride is estranged.
As the days count down to her wedding, the rest of the week unfolds in and around the mesh overlay of the past she has long avoided. Much of the writing is witty, tender, and empathetic as it explores heavy identity and trauma themes. There is a strong surreal, experimental feel to it — and the disjointed and meandering style increases in intensity and frequency, while simultaneously dipping into intentional confusion. And while I appreciated the style at the beginning, the distinct lack of direction made this feel more like a writing assignment stretched to fit a novel, rather than something with intention from the author.
The novel feels like a deluge of dissociative fugue, overwhelming and fragmented. And with Bertino's skill, this largely worked well. The unnamed narrator was, despite all levels of wackiness and self-delusion, she was pretty fun to get to know. Much of the present-day narrative takes place in a newly renovated, but old-looking hotel on Long Island.
Having loved Bertino's newest novel, Beautyland, I did enjoy seeing some of the same elements explored here, but I think this suffered a bit from a storytelling perspective in that she allowed the core of the novel to wander too far off base before hauling it back for a beat too short. Nevertheless, I look forward to what Bertino does next, and I am going to take a peek at her earlier novel, 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas.
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