Week 36 Reading (2026) Rosalind Belben & William Kentridge

“In humdrum fashion one goes slowly crackers.” from “The Hole in the Sky” The 85-year old British writer Rosalind Belben is having a moment. At least four of the eight books she published between 1972 and 2007 have recently been reissued or have new editions on the horizon. I started with Is Beauty Good, first published in 1989. The 31 chapters aren’t really short stories, so let’s call them short episodes in which something very modest like a segment of a conversation or a series of observations occurs. Opening on a Berlin tram and ending in the Berlin zoo, much of the book takes place in and around that city. The assembly of different narrators, which includes a possible East German border guard, a sputtering inmate in some kind of mental hospital, and someone who is probably Belben herself, spend much of their time in gardens or in places where they can contemplate the flowers, weeds, and whatever else is growing. Small animals abound. In the final chapter, “Pruning,” the narrator,…