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Parakeet

Review

Parakeet

PARAKEET by Marie-Helene Bertino is garnering a lot of attention and is deserving of all the accolades and buzz. Surreal and slippery, brimming with emotion, it is hard to characterize and summarize. At its center is the Bride during the week of her wedding. She is ambivalent at best about her nuptials, and has moments of extreme anxiety and hostility when she thinks too much about what her life with the groom will be like. She, an unnamed narrator, worries about losing herself in marriage and becoming both more and less like the women in her family: fierce, weird, unhappy, unhealthy, lonely, loving.
 
In the days leading up to her Long Island wedding, the Bride is staying at the inn where the festivities will take place. Walking into her room, she finds a parakeet that she immediately recognizes to be her deceased grandmother. A conversation about the internet ensues, but most important is her grandmother’s admonition that the Bride look for her estranged brother Tom, even though her grandmother tells her she won’t find him.

"This is a tremendous novel. Bertino’s style and vision are fresh and singular. There is plenty of wry humor and blistering insight.... PARAKEET is smart and tender, tough and weird, provocative and totally enjoyable."

Thus begins a journey, interior and exterior, to find the elusive Tom and confront all that he stands for in the Bride’s life. Along the way, she shops for a new wedding dress (her grandmother, in bird form, ruined hers), comes to difficult realizations about her best friend, inhabits her mother’s body, and watches the play that Tom wrote about her and a horrible attack she survived many years ago.

Every time she enters the elevator at the inn, she gets trapped inside. The wedding reception itself is seismically fractured, and the Bride spends part of the night wandering labyrinthine hallways. Bertino makes clear that these are not delusions, but a reality reflecting and refracting a lifetime of uncertainty, of withholding, of seeking. The Bride realizes this is happening and is shocked by the rifts in her sense of existence and self. Bertino confronts the Bride with challenges and choices: Will she go through with the wedding, forgive her brother, come to understand her mother, and move past the “injury” that has defined her emotional and physical form?
 
This is a tremendous novel. Bertino’s style and vision are fresh and singular. There is plenty of wry humor and blistering insight. She takes on marriage, friendship and family, and the ways in which they promise happiness and belonging --- and how they fail to deliver. Yet the book remains optimistic. The Bride may be cynical, peculiar and even a bit lonely, but she changes in interesting and important ways by the end. Motherhood and various sisterhoods are examined in general and in particular. Birds, hallways, altered bodies, lakes, oceans and islands all occupy the “dream logic” and theatrics of the novel, and invite characters to experience the fascinating and difficult real world in which Bertino places her Bride.

PARAKEET is smart and tender, tough and weird, provocative and totally enjoyable.

Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman on June 12, 2020

Parakeet
by Marie-Helene Bertino

  • Publication Date: June 1, 2021
  • Genres: Fiction, Women's Fiction
  • Paperback: 240 pages
  • Publisher: Picador
  • ISBN-10: 1250798515
  • ISBN-13: 9781250798510