Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon Van Booy

I was left unsettled, as reading a mix of poetry, rote schoolbook text and mundane ordinary prose would make anyone feel. An ethereal tone, which I am sure is meant to be enchanting, becomes simply annoying. It is like a mixing of pearls and stones. The lyricism gets lost in the confusion of the surrounding text. There are beautiful lines in this novel, but they are plopped in among many others that are ordinary. We learn of the three through flashbacks, but these flashbacks with innumerable shifts in time and place are confusing and give a choppy feel to the story. Their pasts must be revealed, if we are to understand them, the central theme of the story being if the past can be laid to rest and resolution reached. All three are running from troubled pasts.

Henry is an aspiring archaeologist from Cambridge, England. George is from Kentucky, an Ivy League student of ancient languages. How is this to be resolved, with three?! Rebecca is French, a young and beautiful red-haired Air France flight attendant, flaky, and an artist too,with dreams of one day attaining fame at her own Parisian art show. And then there is Henry, an accomplished young Welsh archaeologist who spends his days devotedly uncovering the city’s past as a way to escape his own – a past that holds a secret that not even his doting parents can talk about.Īs these three lost and lonely souls wander the city, a series of chance encounters sets off events that will forever define them, in this powerful portrait of friendship and young love.Three meet in Athens one summer, maybe during the 1980s or 90s, something like that. He has no close relationships with anyone and spends his days hunched over books or in a drunken stupor. George has come to Athens to learn ancient languages after growing up in New England boarding schools and Ivy League colleges. A gifted artist, she seeks solace and inspiration in the Mediterranean heat of Athens – trying to understand who she is and how she can love without fear.

Simon Van Booy, winner of the prestigious Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, brings his gift for poetic dialogue and sumptuous imagery to thisdebut novel of longing and discovery amidst the ruins of Ancient Greece.

Everything Beautiful Began After by Simon Van Booy