Beautyland
Marie-Helene Bertino
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Beautyland
Marie-Helene Bertino
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
...astonishing.
While this seems a proposition that promises the speculative, Bertino prefers to ground the reader in the minutia of the human experience, allowing for a deeper excavation of the strange and wonderful and heart-wrenching realities of what it means to be alive down here on Earth.
One of the most memorable characters in recent American literature, and Bertino’s novel is a stunning look at her life.
Is Adina really an alien? Or is she just lonely, confused, profoundly hurt? The joy of Beautyland lies partly in the way it rejects the simplicity of this false binary. Like Bertino’s fantastic previous novel, Parakeet (2020), this book is interested in the charged terrain of uncertainty and the tender ideas that emerge when we poke at the unknown.
There is a certain kind of fiction that, in its pitch-perfect encapsulation of reality, functions to help us mourn the distance between the world we want and the world as it is. These are the stories and novels of Marie-Helene Bertino.
...a wonderfully quirky, funny, bittersweet novel.
One of the (many) delights here is how the author captures the world through a child’s eyes. We forget how confusing the unexplained and contradictory world of adults is to kids; they truly are little aliens thrust into this realm, needing to puzzle so much out on their own.
As she did in the expertly imagination-bending Parakeet (2020), and with so much humor and heart, Bertino balances fantasy and hyperrealism, metaphor and fact. For whom is the act of belonging not, to some degree, an exhausting, lifelong quest? It’s like fiction was invented for Adina and her tale, which unspools so assuredly readers might mistake it for their own..
The more she’s enveloped by ordinary life, the more distant and uncommunicative her alien superiors become. Almost against her will, almost while she’s not paying attention, Adina becomes human whether she understands it or not, and Bertino’s strange, memorable narrative becomes increasingly moving. By the time the human experience of grief reaches her, readers have been so caught up in her watery strangeness that these scenes hit like a freight train, combining sharp insight with Bertino’s unblinkingly observant prose.
A compelling, touching story that weds Bertino’s masterful eye for the poignant detail of the everyday with her equally virtuosic flair as a teller of the tallest kinds of tales—so tall, in this case, they are interplanetary. A heartbreaking book that staggers with both truth and beauty..
The triumphant latest from Bertino offers a wryly comic critique of social conventions from the perspective of a woman who also happens to be an alien from another planet.