Latest / The Book Brief Project / Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt — Until It Wasn’t

Transcript

Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt — Until It Wasn’t · The Book Brief Project

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Death has been gentle for a while now. He narrated
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: a novel about a girl who steals books in wartime Germany.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: He took a holiday in a Hollywood film and discovered
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: peanut butter. On the fiction shelves, he mostly sits at
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: bedsides these days, patient and softly spoken, holding a hand
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: until it goes still. The scythe went missing somewhere along
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: the way. Nobody seems to have filed a report. These
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: books share an odd problem. They are written for the grieving,
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: and they arrive carrying a warning for the grieving. Read
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: the reviews, and the same caution comes back, like the
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: small print on a medicine box. Not for anyone who
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: has just lost someone. Not for anyone who is ill.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: The readers the comfort was built for are the readers
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: told to stay away from it. One reviewer said exactly
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: that about the novel in this episode. Another reader, in
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: treatment for a serious illness of her own, said the opposite.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: For her, it was the right book at the right time,
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: because nobody in it dies as a punishment. The book
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: is Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves,
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: and its narrator is Death, a quiet man in jeans
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: and a t-shirt called Travis Smith. Two readers, one warning,
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: and they cannot both be right about who the comfort
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: is for. So the question to carry through the next
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: quarter of an hour is whether a novel can console
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: you about a death that makes you watch without asking
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: you to look somewhere else. It is a large question
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: to hang on a book about a man who runs
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: out of cat food. Ben Reeves designs websites for a
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: company that prints books. He paints and makes music on
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: the side. And an early draft of this novel won
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: a prize for unpublished fiction in 2024. Since it came
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: out in July of 2026, it has reached the New
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: York Times list, and a film is already in development.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: The day job matters more than it sounds. Reeves spends
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: his working hours near the machinery that turns stories into objects,
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: and he gave his narrator an evening hobby from the
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: same family. When he is not working, death restores old photographs.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: His work is the other thing. Travis lives in a
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: plain flat in a gray English town, and he is
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: also inside everything, everywhere, all the time. He's in the
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: mayflies over the river and in every person on the street,
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: and he knows how long each of them has left.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: His job is to sit with people in their final
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: minutes and then take them into whatever comes next, which
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: the book never shows. He does not judge and he
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: does not interfere. Of each person he visits, he says,
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: in his flat way, that they know who he is
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: and why he has come. Everyone knows, he says, at
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: the end. The first stretch of the novel is built
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: from these visits. Short passages, one life each, told as
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: a ledger of years, days, and minutes, with the salient
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: details picked out the way a restorer picks dust from
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: a print. An old man who was ready. A car
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: crash on an ordinary morning, with birds still going about
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: their business in the hedges beside the road. Some readers
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: found this stretch flat, and they are not wrong about
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: the temperature. Travis narrates like a man reading gas meters.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: That flatness is the design. A being who attends every
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: death cannot afford to feel each one, so he has
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: learned to record them instead. Then comes the cat. A
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: white cat keeps climbing in through Travis's window and will
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: not leave him alone, and the only companion death has
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: in the world needs feeding. He crosses the hall and
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: asks the neighbor whether she has any cat food. For
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: a being whose whole discipline is distance, it is the
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: worst thing he could have done, and the book treats
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: it as a joke that will stop being funny. The
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: neighbor is Dahlia, a midwife. She spends her days at
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: the other door, The one people come in through, catching
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: them as they arrive. She lives with two daughters, a toddler,
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: and an eight-year-old named Layla. And it is Layla who
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: does the damage. She decides the man across the hall
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: is lonely, so she invites him to her birthday. Death,
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: who has been present at every ending since there were endings,
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: gets a paper invitation to a child's party. From there,
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: the novel slows into ordinary life. and the ordinary life
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: is where Reeves is strongest. Travis learns to play a
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: video game. He watches television with the family across the hall.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: At some point, Dahlia rests her head on his shoulder,
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: and the narration, which has been reading meters all this time,
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: loses its footing. He says that when Dahlia speaks, the
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: noise of everything everywhere goes quiet, and for the first
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: time he hears one voice instead of all of them.
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: The pairing is obvious, and Reeves plays it lightly. A
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: midwife and death live a few steps apart on the
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: same landing, each working one of the two doors every
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: life has to pass through. As far as Dahlia can tell,
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: he is a tired neighbor who happens to be good
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: with her children. In the evenings, he goes on mending
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: old photographs, the creased prints of people long gone, until
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: they look the way they looked on the day they
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: were taken. For a man who takes people out of
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: the world, it is a strange way to spend his
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: free time. It may also be the only way he
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: has of giving something back. Scattered among these scenes is
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: the line the whole book is named after. In one
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: of the visits, a dying woman smiles as though she
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: has just thought of something, and Travis tells us she
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: looks as if everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. Then
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: she closes her eyes. The phrase is in the present
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: tense there. It describes the instant of dying from inside it.
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: On the cover, it has moved into the past. Everything
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: was beautiful. Nothing hurt. That is how the phrase sounds
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: when someone says it afterwards, about a person who is
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: no longer there to agree. So Reeves has already handed
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: you a death who cannot look away, and a family
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: he was never supposed to love. What the book has
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: not shown you yet is what all that looking costs.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: and why a man who records deaths for a living
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: would take his title from a tombstone. Up to the birthday,
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: this is the book on the cover, warm and a
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: little sad. After it, the novel turns into something the
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: blurbs are careful not to describe. The line belongs to Vonnegut.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: It comes from Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel he wrote about surviving
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: the firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war. sheltered
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: in a meat locker under a slaughterhouse while the city
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: burned above him. His hero comes home from the war
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: unstuck in time. Aliens teach him that every moment exists
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: at once, forever, and that the sensible thing is to
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: spend your attention on the pleasant moments and ignore the
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: awful ones. The phrase is the epitaph on that hero's gravestone.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. Vonnegut writes all of
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: that with a straight face and very little trust. His
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: hero is a broken man, and the alien's wisdom is
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: the most comfortable thing a broken man could hear. Look
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: only at the good moments. The bad ones are there too,
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: but you need not visit them. Readers have argued for
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: more than 50 years about whether the book endorses that
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: view or diagnoses it, and the epitaph sits right in
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: the middle of the argument. It is either peace or anesthetic,
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: and Vonnegut refuses to say which. Vonnegut had a refrain
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: for this. Every time anything dies in Slaughterhouse-Five, from a
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: soldier to a bottle of champagne gone flat, the narrator
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: says the same three words. So it goes. He says
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: it more than a hundred times. It is the sound
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: of a man recording a death so that he does
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: not have to feel it. And Travis's ledger is the
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: same sound in a softer register. Now put Travis next
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: to that hero. He is the same creature. He sees
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: every moment of every life at once, and he has
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: been getting through it the way the aliens recommend by
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: keeping the ledger and keeping his distance. Reeves has said
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: the line captured everything he wanted to say about the
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: pain and beauty of existence. In one interview, the phrase
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: came up as carved on a tombstone inside his own novel,
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: meant almost ironically. The word almost is carrying a great
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: deal of weight. It is the exact distance between Vonnegut
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: and Reeves. Because in the second half, Reeves does something
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: Vonnegut's aliens would forbid. He makes Travis look at an
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: awful moment and stay there. Tragedy comes for the family
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: across the hall, and one of the children is going
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: to die. Death knows it before anyone else does, and Death,
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: who has never once wanted a different ending, wants one.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: He cannot have it. The novel does not hurry past
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: the loss, and it does not hurry past what comes after.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: There are conversations where nobody finds the right thing to say,
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: and Reeves leaves the silence on the page instead of
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: filling it. Readers keep describing the second half as heavier,
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: some as oppressive. and they are describing the best writing
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: in the novel. It is in these pages that the
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: tension at the center of the book becomes visible. The
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: novel's lesson is attention. Notice the cat at the window
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: and the head on the shoulder. Travis is the only
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: character who notices everything, and he is also the loneliest
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: person in the book. If total attention were a consolation,
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: death would be the happiest being alive. The novel never
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: quite faces what its own narrator proves, and it is
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: better for leaving that unresolved than it would be for
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: pretending otherwise. The trouble is the frame around all this.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: The mayflies return, living their single day in a bright
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: cloud over the water, and they are asked to carry
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: the meaning. Then, in its final pages, the book turns
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: to the reader directly. Imagine, it says, that you are
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: on your deathbed and you were given 20 minutes to
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: go back to one ordinary moment. What would you do
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: with them? One reviewer who loved the novel admitted that
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: Reeves hits you over the head with the message. Another said,
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: more bluntly, that the message is an obvious one, and
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: that anyone taking on this subject needs something new to say.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: They are right, and the reason is more interesting than
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: a complaint about subtlety. The 20 minutes are an exercise
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: for you, not a consolation for the woman across the hall.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: They are the alien's advice in a gentler voice. Go
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: and find a good moment and live in it. After
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: a hundred pages that refuse to look away, the book
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: asks you to look away, kindly toward the pleasant moments,
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: which is exactly what Vonnegut's broken hero learned to do.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: The ending that so many readers call shattering, is where
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: the novel stops trusting its own middle. If this pace
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: suits you, a single book read slowly, and argued with honestly,
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: follow the Book Brief Project. The next one is already
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: open on the desk. It remains a good book. It
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: is also two books bound together, and the better one
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: is in the middle, where a man who sees everything
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: sits beside a child and can change nothing. The weaker
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: one is the one that gets quoted, because it is
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: the one that fits on a card. So the warning
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: on the box is half right. The grieving should have
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: this book, but they should have its middle, the part
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: where Reeves stops explaining and simply stays in the silence
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: with them. The last pages can wait for a better year.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: Everything was beautiful is something the living can honestly say.
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: Nothing hurt belongs on the stone.