everything beautiful began after a novel

His characters suffer in the drunk stupor of tragic beauty, they fall helplessly in love, bear the scars of disappointment and crawl in the dark to become a better version of themselves. Van Booy has an exceptional gift to capture the fog of contradictory feelings. Devastatingly poetic, replete of painful honesty, Everything Beautiful Began After will provide space to reflect upon the things we can or can’t control, upon the fatal coincidences of life, upon the sarcastic joke of existence in all its senses, physical and spiritual, factual and fictional. What ensues is a novel that will shake you to the core with every deliberate word. Then Van Booy’s magic unravels, and surprisingly, much more than a mere story of a love triangle develops. These are the kind of questions that seem to be asked in the first part of the novel. They do find love indeed, the kind of obliterating, blinding love that burns with intensity, but do they make a home of it? Are they honest with each other? With themselves? Are they ready to be? They ache to feel needed, to fill the void of their ghosts. Shackled by events of their pasts, they struggle to give meaning to their lives. Rebecca, Henry and George live in an emotional landscape rather than in the present time.

Youth doesn’t always come with a sense of never-ending possibility, and finding a home, a place to be, isn’t always as evident and easy as the three characters in this unusual story think when they first meet in Athens. Mix and remix those three concepts as much as you want, and you will never achieve what Van Booy manages to achieve in this extraordinary novel: a modern Odyssey with as much stylism as soul.

Everything beautiful began after a novel