Brand new love affair: Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon Van Booy
I am having a new love affair with an eBook excerpt of Simon Van Booy's Everything Beautiful Began After, which is available on GoodReads here.
I love this author's take on prose, it gives impressions of quiet, secret places full of rainstorms and typewritten script on soft, antiquated paper. When it comes to words I am quite the romantic. I forget all my responsibility to be a good reader and look at these words and ideas objectively to see if they are "well formed" "well written" or have anything of real skill or value and just get lost in these seas of letters and silences of the pauses in the spaces between.
So far, I am more interested in her as a child then the story of who she was when she grew up. I am hoping the book
has a bit more to do with the Prologue then what came after. I am looking forward to what happens next.
Some choice prose:
"Everything was already here and I am the last to be born." (p13/3)
"Athens has long been a place where lonely people go." (p21/11)
Personally, I think Athens is a place people go to because they live in the past.
"The museums are crammed with moments that went missing from history," (p23/13)
..."The beauty of artifacts is in how they reassure us we’re not the first to die." (p23/13)
"She would live in exile with her desires." (p28/18)
"The mystery of pockets." (p13/3)
My favourite line so far: "...her real name is known only by the change in light that comes without sound," (p14/4).