Beautiful Soon Enough
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Winner of FC2’s American Book Review/Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize
Margo Berdeshevsky’s Beautiful Soon Enough is a collection of hypnotic stories that capture the lives—worldly, sexual, obsessive—of twenty–three arresting women.These are snapshots and collages: stories of women on the outside, looking in; of women content to end their affairs; of young women learning the power of seduction; and of older women reminiscing about past loves. They are women who cannot live without love’s embrace, and women who have found it and feel that it is never enough. They are women d'un certain âge and women with naked hearts, of any age.Berdeshevsky’s tales cross the planet: from beds in Paris to the roofs of Havana, from Venice Beach to the hills of Dubrovnik. With settings as varied as the characters they depict, these tales illuminate the lives of women desperate for a balance between love, comfort, and freedom. Personal, driven, and lyrical, together they are Beautiful Soon Enough.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 23 brief, dreamy stories set in locales from Paris to Cuba, poet, actress and photographer Berdeshevsky remains transfixed by beauty and desire. "Window," the first piece, sets the tone: a woman stands at the window wearing a garter belt and motions to her lover standing outside in the snow. Elsewhere, seductions occur in places like church, where a narrator waits to meet her neighbor; on the streets of San Francisco; within a community of Russian migr s in Paris; or by the waiter in a Parisian cafe bathroom scenes all depicted with a certain aloof obliqueness. Evocations rather than development are Berdeshevsky's forte, as in "Cage," where a caged white female monkey in a Manhattan pet store becomes a metaphor for the protagonist, who is sexually assaulted in the store. In many of the pieces, accompanied by photographs of statues and nudes by the author, the protagonists wait "for a beautiful thing to happen." These moody moments can be evanescent, but as stories they're not quite satisfying.
