Is Beauty Good
- Author: Rosalind Belben (England)
- Book type: English novel from 1989
- Publisher: And Other Stories
- To be released: July 14, 2026
- Length: 240 pages
- Sizes: 13,1 x 19,7 x 15 cm
- Weight: 164 gram
- Format: paperback
- Prize: £14.99
- Buying Options >
Rosalind Belben Is Beauty Good reviews and information
Whenever a review of Is Beauty Good, the 1989 Berlin novel written by Rosalind Belben, the English author, appears in the media, we’ll highlight it on this page.
- “Rosalind Belben, in Is Beauty Good, takes the most extreme formal risks with painful elegance . . . Belben has written pages about sexual desire, frustration and loss which are clearer and more compelling than any I can think of in literature. She has a photographic eye for natural beauty, and is also tough-minded and funny.” (Maggie Gee, The Observer)
- “Spare, lucid prose, reminiscent of Woolf’s The Waves.” (Christina Kooning, The Guardian)
- “A beautiful work… it says a great deal about the world we live in… more life-like and more alive than most fiction.” (Michael Hamburger)
Blurb of the Rosalind Belben Berlin novel from 1989
‘That the music may be polyphonic is no grounds for not listening,’ scribbles a man for his stone-deaf friend. In Is Beauty Good there are many such voices. People talk to various listeners, even to silent ones. They talk to themselves, they resort to handwriting. The inanimate too may be granted a whimsical presence: a child’s tricycle, an antique chest. But, witty and ironic, the novel speaks with one voice of the things that speak, and don’t speak to us: ‘I drank carrot juice, beetroot juice. Disgusting. It seemed undignified, to be so desperate as to drink beetroot juice. Yet people do it without a second thought.’
It begins in Berlin by the Wall. It ends in Berlin – still before 1989 – in the Tiergarten Zoo, to the boom and roar and moan of animals. More often we find ourselves in mountains or an English garden, in the natural world, the loss of which Is Beauty Good so memorably laments.
Rosalind Belben was born on 1 february 1941 in Dorset in the rural southwest of England where she spent her early childhood. From the age of nine she was at boarding school on the edge of Dartmoor, in Devon. Almost straight from school she went in 1959 to work for the next two years in theatre, meaning to become a writer of stage plays. That didn’t happen. Her subsequent life has been nomadic, her experience and employment varied – with sometimes, nevertheless, years on end passed in a single place. The countryside of Dorset has been both inspiration and recurrent setting. Quite as much, ‘abroad’ has exerted a powerful draw. There have been many adored destinations. Südtirol or the Alto Adige, the German-speaking Alpine region in the north of Italy, from 1978 – or in the 1990s Tunisia, with its myriad Roman and Phoenician remains and Islamic culture. Many epiphanies. In 1987 Belben was in West Berlin as a Fellow of the Artist in Residence Program, staying for fifteen months. New editions of Dreaming of Dead People, Is Beauty Good and Choosing Spectacles are forthcoming from And Other Stories. Among her other novels are The Limit, Hound Music and Our Horses in Egypt, which won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2007.