Rosalind Belben
New York Review of Books ($17.95)

by Julia Laurel Mueller

In the last three years, three novels by English writer Rosalind Belben originally published between 1974 and 1989 have been republished. Since it’s been nineteen years since her most recent book, Our Horses in Egypt (Chatto & Windus, 2007), won the James Tait Black Award, what accounts for this flurry of renewed interest? Perhaps it suggests a fresh appeal in how this resolutely eccentric writer—potentially for anyone, definitely not for everyone—makes readers feel at home in some of the least accommodating parts of language. In this age of algorithms and large language models, Belben’s voices are stubbornly small, lingering, and unassimilable.

The new edition of Is Beauty Good offers an opportunity to encounter anew Belben’s 1989 novel composed of a chorus of unidentified voices. The title is a drifting incantation in the form of a question, the absence of punctuation holding it back from ever being answerable. Its three simple words, recurring at intervals throughout the novel, allow Belben to suspend the title’s meaning, and to keep it in play.

In her introduction to this edition, German writer and translator Esther Kinsky finds a quality “between the lines” in Belben’s book. With no exact verbal equivalence in English, Fremde means “somewhere between strange and foreign and alien.” On that basis, you might think the novel is difficult, but it is not really a novel of ideas—it never asks for strenuous interpretation. Rather, it invites us to take it as it is, to enter into the sensuous private life of words. Never finished with its question, it is not a book to look to for answers.  

Kinsky, who ventures that Fremde is “a much underrated feature of human life,” is the perfect person to write this introduction: She expresses an instinctive sympathy for Belben’s sensibility, and notes that many of the novel’s voices speak from West Berlin, or from “Alpine regions where German is spoken.” German words sometimes “crop up, without comment or translation.” The “foreignness” which is part of Fremde becomes a way of emphasizing not only these German interlopers among English words, but the foreignness of language itself, the bedrock at which all language is foreign. Even our own language is not always ours when we are its, and vice-versa. Belben dignifies this contradiction by a method of perpetual shifting and displacement—as when one of the voices tells us of a “companion’s mother” with a “disorder, a facial cataclysm”: “it redefined her thoughts, her world, her circumstances . . . But one had to look away while it was happening.”

We are never formally introduced to any of the figures (I hesitate to say characters) in the novel, yet this lack enables a rare form of intimacy, inviting us into the open air of a collective mind sifting through language. Without enforcing identity, Belben’s voices become disarmingly (and sometimes alarmingly) open to us, and we become vulnerable to them. To be a reader in the company of this motley collection of souls is also to find oneself welcomed in without formality. Belben’s sentences, and the voices speaking them, are forthright and somehow familiar, yet always a little aslant too—enough to keep us from ever making that self-satisfied sound of comprehending profundity. One voice recalls a dog named Florus in the chapter named for him: “His face would change, as emotion transforms one, when a smoothing or a wrinkling occurred in his thoughts.” That slip from “his” to “one” and back to “his” conveys the characteristic mutability of Belben’s syntax.

Belben has been compared to Virginia Woolf, yet her prose also brings to mind that of Samuel Beckett—the words rattling around in the skull; the eruptive, uncouth tones; the profane sense of humor. Where Beckett’s style proceeds by economy and recombination, however, Belben cultivates a multiplicity of inner voices. The only boundaries between these voices are the chapters.

“Flowers have no sense of danger,” the voice of the final chapter announces, after wondering whether “only the plants and flowers can know what’s beautiful.” Flowers, those almost universal emblems of unobjectionable beauty, become the only ones who might actually know what the word means, though of course they themselves are wordless. The novel often seems to be working out ways to communicate what is, strictly speaking, non-communicable. The simple longings of the speaker of a chapter called “Exile” reverberate through the whole: “Let me have a garden, let me have a dog, let me have privacy.”

Fortunately, Belben’s is a confiding privacy. The chapters are grouped into three larger sections, the third bearing the subtitle “from the deaf man’s conversation book”—a phrase that suggests, in Belben’s inimitable idiom, a condition of language, that uncanny medium in which we move very slowly toward a fragile, provisional understanding of what we might mean. “It’s a toss-up, whether silence is better,” she writes. Is Beauty Good is an unnerving testament to our deepest inarticulacies, yet somehow Belben holds it out to us with an endearing warmth. It’s by this grace that we can read without despair, and even with a peculiar joy.