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A review by yojen
Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann
3.0
Alriiiiiiiight. I picked this up without knowing its content or even looking at the cover. No, seriously, the title says everything about the book, but I completely missed the DEAD CHILD ON THE COVER.
**Spoilers down below. Proceed with caution.**
Before beginning this book, I only knew it would be an anti-fairy fairy tale story. The story begins with immediacy, and we soon learn this tale starts in the middle, without mentioning the events which occurred before leading to the death of a little girl in the woods. This riddle is never solved. Instead, fairy-like creatures inhabit the dead girl's corpse and possessions, including one little sprite who eats maggots growing in the mushy decaying skull. Yes, that happens. It's like watching a nature documentary, knowing that someone's gotta eat so something's gotta die everyday. The characters commit petty acts of greed and violence, yet Kerascoët's whimsical and beautiful illustrations pinpoint the irony of the whole thing, a constant allusion to the book's title. As the reader you can only sympathize for Aurora, but even she does morally questionable things, like punishing a mouse by squeezing out its eyes so that it's blinded and left to die (and eventually eaten by the tiny fairy people). Actually, I sympathized the most with this mouse.
Truth be told, it was almost like reading Milton's Paradise Lost. In Paradise Lost the fallen angel named Lucifer, or Satan if that's your fancy, makes mistakes which we as humans can understand. He's a charmer and written in a likable fashion, but this was purposefully done by Milton to show that if you can sympathize with the devil, then you're still a "fallen" and corrupted member of humanity. Here's the point I'm trying to make: in the final act of this book, Aurora tricks her petty fairy folk to climb into an oven where a giant lights a fire to cook his dinner, and everyone burns to death. They were dumb, foolish, and violent, so is this an act of murder or justice? And why do I sympathize with Aurora, a girl who literally falls in the beginning sequence like an Alice in Wonderland twist, falling like the fallen angel named Lucifer? And if I choose to like Aurora more for this mass genocide, does that mean I'm a "fallen" creature filled with beautiful darkness?
Yes. Probably yes.
**Spoilers down below. Proceed with caution.**
Before beginning this book, I only knew it would be an anti-fairy fairy tale story. The story begins with immediacy, and we soon learn this tale starts in the middle, without mentioning the events which occurred before leading to the death of a little girl in the woods. This riddle is never solved. Instead, fairy-like creatures inhabit the dead girl's corpse and possessions, including one little sprite who eats maggots growing in the mushy decaying skull. Yes, that happens. It's like watching a nature documentary, knowing that someone's gotta eat so something's gotta die everyday. The characters commit petty acts of greed and violence, yet Kerascoët's whimsical and beautiful illustrations pinpoint the irony of the whole thing, a constant allusion to the book's title. As the reader you can only sympathize for Aurora, but even she does morally questionable things, like punishing a mouse by squeezing out its eyes so that it's blinded and left to die (and eventually eaten by the tiny fairy people). Actually, I sympathized the most with this mouse.
Truth be told, it was almost like reading Milton's Paradise Lost. In Paradise Lost the fallen angel named Lucifer, or Satan if that's your fancy, makes mistakes which we as humans can understand. He's a charmer and written in a likable fashion, but this was purposefully done by Milton to show that if you can sympathize with the devil, then you're still a "fallen" and corrupted member of humanity. Here's the point I'm trying to make: in the final act of this book, Aurora tricks her petty fairy folk to climb into an oven where a giant lights a fire to cook his dinner, and everyone burns to death. They were dumb, foolish, and violent, so is this an act of murder or justice? And why do I sympathize with Aurora, a girl who literally falls in the beginning sequence like an Alice in Wonderland twist, falling like the fallen angel named Lucifer? And if I choose to like Aurora more for this mass genocide, does that mean I'm a "fallen" creature filled with beautiful darkness?
Yes. Probably yes.