Parakeet
Marie-Helene Bertino, 2020
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374229450
Summary
A darkly funny and warm-hearted novel about a young woman whose dead grandmother (in the form of a parakeet) warns her not to marry and sends her out to find an estranged loved one.
The week of her wedding, The Bride is visited by a bird she recognizes as her dead grandmother because of the cornflower blue line beneath her eyes, her dubious expression, and the way she asks: What is the Internet?
Her grandmother is a parakeet. She says not to get married. She says: Go and find your brother.
In the days that follow, The Bride's march to the altar becomes a wild and increasingly fragmented, unstable journey that bends toward the surreal and forces her to confront matters long buried.
A novel that does justice to the hectic confusion of becoming a woman today, Parakeet asks and begins to answer the essential questions.
How do our memories make, cage, and free us?
How do we honor our experiences and still become our strongest, truest selves?
Who are we responsible for, what do we owe them, and how do we allow them to change?
Urgent, strange, warm-hearted, and sly, Parakeet is ribboned with joy, fear, and an inextricable thread of real love. It is a startling, unforgettable, life-embracing exploration of self and connection. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of 2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas and the story collection Safe as Houses. She was the 2017 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland.
Her work has received The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, The Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Mississippi Review Story Prize, fellowships from MacDowell, Sewannee, and NYC's The Center for Fiction, and has twice been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts.
Formerly the associate editor of One Story and Catapult, she now teaches at NYU, The New School, and Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
What is Parakeet about? It’s about an ambivalent bride. It’s about PTSD, grief, forgiveness, bad mothers, womanhood, monogamy and the nature of time itself. It’s about being a woman trapped by her subconscious and social conventions. It's a Homeric quest to reclaim control over the heroine's own life and sanity…. Deeply funny… disquieting and darkly comic and vulnerable and true…. Bertino's writing is lyrical and sharp.
Bess Kalb - New York Times Book Review
[A] dreamlike, sardonic novel about a woman questioning her impending marriage…. The bride’s conflicted emotions come to a head as the novel builds to a satisfying end. Fans of Rivka Galchen will delight in Bertino’s subtly fantastical tale.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Bertino skillfully weaves together reality and flights of fancy as she tackles a wide variety of issues women face and the different ways to navigate these issues. An amusing yet instructive work about how personal perspective can change everything; highly recommended.
Library Journal
(Starred review) Brilliant, chaotic, and fantastically untethered from humdrum reality . . . Bertino playfully, precisely builds a big world in these pages, somehow making the case that there's too much love, pain, and magic to ever fit in one story, and fitting it in all the same.
Booklist
(Starred review) Self-assured, strange, and winning…. The book’s linguistic pyrotechnics and the shimmering, miragelike nature of Bertino’s images demand a lot of the reader…. A vivid book about lives visited by violent strangeness but lived with authentic humor and hope.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for PARAKEET … then take off on your own:
1. In an angry exchange with a man she describes as having "frat boy resting face," The Bride thinks to herself, "I am a bird trapped inside another person’s life, sensing its mistake and trying to exit against relentless glass.” In what way does that passage encapsulate the narrator's struggle throughout this novel? How else might you describe The Bride's confusion?
2. Talk about The Bride's post-traumatic stress, the fall-out from the violent terrorist attack she suffered when she was 10 years old. Is PTSD the sum total of her confusion and lack of stability?
3. Why does her grandmother try to persuade The Bride not to go through with the marriage?
4. Talk about the novel's other characters: Tom, the narrator's brother; Rose, her maid of honor; and The Bride's mother.
5. The Bride observes, "I get the sense that the number of people who are married is not equal to the number of people that give the institution much thought." Care to unpack that statement? What does she mean? Do you think she's correct?
6. As you were reading, what did you want The Bride to do: marry or not marry?
7. Is the ending a satisfying one?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)