everything beautiful began after a novel

“She was from Nigeria and spoke English gently, words handed, not thrown.” One day she knocks on his door and asks Mr. He is a lonely, solitary man with a disfigured head who befriends the son of his new next-door neighbor. Hugo’s point of view in Manchester, England, 1981. He collapses and Martin rushes to cradle him. Hugo, whose head is badly deformed because as a Nazi soldier he was shot in the face during the war. One day the rest home where Martin works welcomes a new resident, Mr. The truth is closer than thought and lies buried in what we already know. He realized this early on, and realized too that what people think are their lives are merely its conditions. will always be stronger than any truth.” When Martin is a teenager the family moves from Paris and opens the Cafe Parisienne in L.A.įor a long time now, he has been aware that anyone in the world could be his mother, or his father, or his brother or sister. “When Martin was old enough to begin school, his parents seated him at the kitchen table with a glass of milk, and told him the story of when someone gave them a baby.” Then his parents tell him, “Our love for you. The book - beautifully and poetically narrated in the third person from the viewpoints of several different characters - opens with Martin, a janitor at a retirement home in Los Angeles in 2010. Sometimes the manner people are linked never becomes apparent to them at all, but that does not necessarily signify a lack of connection. As the title of Simon Van Booy’s gentle and lovely new novel, “The Illusion of Separateness,” might suggest, people are connected and intertwined in ways that are not always immediately apparent.

Everything beautiful began after a novel