Everything Beautiful Began After audiobook

There were times, early on, when I began to have doubts about this book — I feared it was going to turn into a tiresome love triangle. What kept me reading was Van Booy’s delightful prose and memories of The Illusion of Separateness. I needn’t have worried: Van Booy is incapable of writing anything mundane. The meaning of the title only becomes apparent “after”. Among its many other virtues, this book includes the most penetrating account of the grieving process I’ve yet read, along with a brilliant exploration of a complex friendship that becomes richer and more satisfying as it proceeds over years of turmoil. Near the end, I was reminded of several people I’ve known, people whose past lives had been traumatic, grief-stricken, fraught with danger — and who in later lives seem to embrace the simplest of everyday pleasures with quiet satisfaction and dignity; the beauty that comes “after”.Van Booy’s crafting of language is simply jaw-dropping; every so often, I found myself re-reading passages for the sheer pleasure of savoring his artistry for its own sake, quite apart from its relevance to the story. There are so many gems that I cannot resist quoting just a few of them:Athens lives in the shadow of what it cannot remember, what it can never be again.Fate is for the broken, the selfish, the simple, the lost, and the forever lonely — a distant light comes no closer, nor ever completely disappears.Love is like life but longer.The past is a mess of lines, like a sketch seen from afar. Our perception of the future is the past in disguise. And of the grieving process, he writes: You feel the world going on without you. And soon you become starkly aware that in the great history of life, you mean absolutely nothing.Your grief is something to be admired — the pain of severance. A scar where something used to be. To love again, you must discard what has happened to you, but take from it the strength you’ll need to carry on. This novel doesn’t quite scale the heights achieved by "The Illusion of Separateness" but it’s a thoroughly satisfying story, rich in locale, characterization and mature emotion, the work of a writer very sure of his craft.

There is a shift in book 2 of this novel that makes the amorous utopian blasé narrative of book 1 smartly plotted. And this is not specific to the dramatic shift, but to the shift in how the protagonist is no longer just "Henry" but suddenly compounded into a three letter direct pronoun that allows the spectator to become less the spectator and more the character involved in the spectacle that is Everything Beautiful Began After. There are many modern conventions like this throughout the book that don't cheapen the novel by being trite or "novel," rather they undergird the consistency of Simon Van Booy's writing--spartan and direct like Hemingway, and at other times profoundly articulate and rhythmic like Shakespeare. And that consistency in style is what makes Mr. Van Booy's growing library so exciting to follow.

“For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home.Paces where lonely people can live in exile of their own lives – far from anything that was ever imagined for them.”I was going to start off by saying that I would pretty much read anything that Simon van Booy writes. And then I stopped and thought, this book is actually only the second book of his that I’ve read (the first being his collection of short stories, Love Begins in Winter – even announcing it to be one of my favourite reads of that year). So does that qualify? Perhaps. This is after all his first novel. And it is a beautiful one indeed.So I opened this book – or rather opened the app that opened this Net Galley e-book* – with a bias. I hoped, no, expected this to be a wonderful read that I would recommend to everyone. And it is.I was worried about writing this review-ish post. After reading writing like that, I despair at my own inane-ness (is that such a word? And, see what I mean?). Of course this book is a product of plenty of time slogging away at it, but I like to think that Simon Van Booy is like this in real life too. He gazes out at the shimmering Aegean, sighs, dips his feathered pen into the inkwell and writes rainbows.For there are many passages that I bookmarked or wrote down, many times when I stopped and sighed, other times when I stopped myself from reading too fast, but there were also moments where I had hit the Home button on the iPad and went and looked at something else. Some moments were a little too much for me. Perhaps I just felt too invested in these characters, especially Henry and his love for Rebecca. They had such a meet-cute moment that the reader can’t help falling for them.Before I go any further, I probably should talk a bit about the plot. It’s been talked about in the book blogosphere for quite a while already, but in case you haven’t heard about it, Everything Beautiful Began After is the story of George, and of Henry, and of Rebecca, and it is perhaps also a story of Athens and Europe. It is about head-over-heels, heart-bursting, all-consuming love.On George:“He looked the sort of man who had read all of Marcel Proust in bed. The sort who wanted to get up early but chronically overslept. And he walked slowly, hunched into a cigarette.”Here’s Rebecca:“She would live in exile with her desires. She would live as she imagined them on canvas, like faint patches of starlight: hopeful but so far away; compelling, yet dispossessed of change.”And Henry:Ok I hadn’t actually written a good quote about Henry, at least not one that would not result in a spoiler. So how about these lovelies instead:“Sometimes children not long exiled from that silent world of softness and gesture, can feel in their tiny hearts the nuances of what we say; and though powerless to act, they sense fully those means that creep like figures in a shadow play behind a screen of language.”“The beauty of artifacts is in how they reassure us we’re not the first to die.But those who seek only reassurance from life will never be more than tourists – seeing everything and trying to possess what can only be felt. Beauty is the shadow of imperfection.”“You will love her immediately. She will giggle at bright colors and movement, random things too – like bread falling off the counter. Later, she will run from you naked – refusing to get dressed. She will cry when you drop her off at school, then cry when you pick her up. She will scream for you in the night and not know why.”Right. A certain someone is chewing on my arm, telling me that computer time is up soon. So while I have your attention – and he is contented with my elbow – please read this book.

I couldn't decide if I should give this book two stars or five, so I settled on four.I was sold on it by the blurb beneath it on the shelf at my favorite bookshop, claiming that had Fitzgerald and Hemingway had a baby, it would be this book. As I love both of those authors, I had a hard time saying no. In many ways, this is entirely accurate. (Also, in the author photo at the back, Van Booy definitely looks like he really, really wishes that he was Jay Gatsby.)Ultimately, I think I might not be enough of a romantic for this book. There's a lot of stuff about feelings in it, so I spend a lot of time rolling my eyes. Every time I rolled my eyes, though, they were rolled right back to their regular position very quickly by the sheer beauty of the prose. Van Booy uses language elegantly and subtly--rather than the conspicuous consumption of the nouveau riche linguist, he doesn't flaunt anything. He simply composes sentences that at first glance seem ordinary, but then you realize that it is in fact very high end writing of a distinctive quality.The characters could have given me more. Rebecca verged painfully on Manic Pixie Dream Girl status and Henry and George were terribly standard White Men. On the other hand, Henry and George were quite in the tradition of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, so I should be satisfied that I got exactly what I expected.In the end, I liked this book a lot more than I was irritated by it. I have a lot of bookmarked pages so that I can return to them, and I did a lot of underlining while reading. That's always a good sign.

Everything Beautiful Began After took me by surprise. It begins with a little girl playing in the "wild end of the garden". She's thinking about how she came to be, and realizing there was life before her, she decides she again wants to hear the story about how her parents met.I thought I had an idea of the story this book would tell, but I was taken down a completely different path. Rebecca is a beautiful, young, former French stewardess turned aspiring artist. George is an American, with a bit of a drinking problem, who grew up in boarding schools and Ivy League colleges. Henry is a British archeologist who has been trying to find a way to live with a single, tragic moment from his childhood.They all find themselves in Athens one summer where three chance meetings forge friendships that will shape the rest of their lives. When a catastrophe hits, their lives and relationships are changed forever.It's intriguing, heartbreaking, and hopeful. Advance copy provided by publisher for review.

Usually, I write my own review of a book before I look at what other people have said about it. Two reasons for this: (1) I can be easily swayed by what other readers think, especially if they write articulately and persuasively about it; and (2) some reviews are so perfect that it seems an absolute waste of time straining myself to write my OWN small piece. With this book, I broke my own rules and thus have ended up referencing someone called Vivienne: I couldn't decide if I should give this book two stars or five, so I settled on four. Like Vivienne, I vacillated in my opinion of this novel. Was the prose beautiful, profound and poetic? Or was it precious and pretentious? Did I buy this story? These characters? This setting?Book One, The Greek Affair, is the reader's introduction to the three main characters -- Rebecca (French artist), Henry (Welsh archaeologist) and Charles (American classicist and drunk), all of them exiled by choice in Athens. This bit of the book drew me in; it was pleasurably engrossing. I was prepared to follow the thread of what this story seemed to be and enjoy having the characters reveal their secrets and work out their various neuroses. But then something unexpected and rather awful happens and both characters and reader are totally destabilized. Van Booy experiments with point of view and narration in the rest of the novel and at times I found it very discomfiting. It kept pushing me away. Not sure if the second person point of view really worked for me, or if it's just that I couldn't bear for Henry to blow his life savings on two years of aimless plane trips (truly my idea of hell). My final thoughts? I think this is a good book, but for whatever reason it didn't totally capture me. Like the title, which I never could keep straight in my mind, I am left with the impression of fragments more than a coherent whole.

I love Simon Van Booy, there are few writers that are poetry in every sentence. I was looking forward to this novel and was not disappointed. His characters live experiences I wish I could, expect maybe their tragedies (small and big). It did not end the way I anticipated, and I loved both George and Henry as Rebecca did. Strange aside, those are my two favorite names in French.I love that I can read his characters and feel pity for them, anger toward them and love. His characters are always raw and alive, scarred and human. I cannot wait for more by Van Booy. You'll be sorry you skipped him, and ignore the others that claim there was no point, no purpose to the novel. I think they just missed the meaning.

Beautiful prose and finally, a not super depressing book for my 2018 year in reading. I mean, still really sad. But not depressing.

Do you ever need to take a break after you finish a book because you know that whatever you read next can't even begin to compare with what you just put down? Me too.