Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally RooneyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
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I struggled with this book, which is odd, because I also rate it highly. To me, this is one of those more experimental writings. It feels very literary, and you have to concentrate a lot to read it. Plot isn't really the point in this story. It's about character--and the characterisation is phenomenal. Rooney really paints vivid pictures of all her characters. They feel real and I felt connected at times to them, but there was also this incredible distance, like I could never truly understand them. And it was this balance between being kept close and being pushed away that really kept me coming back to the story.
The prose was challenging at times. I was in hospital at some of the points when I was dipping into this story, and I did skim-read a lot of the letters in this story, because I found I was preferring the 'present day' action, rather than when Alice and Eileen write to each other. The topics they talk about are quite 'high-brow', and I found some of this difficult to concentrate on, particularly when I wanted a light read and entertainment.
The writing craft is amazing though. There are so many amazing paragraphs to analyse. It's a story about friendship and relationships, about growing up and being an adult, about love and loss and moving forward, about expectations and societal pressure, about climate change and politics, about mental health, and about what it means to be human.
View all my reviews
I struggled with this book, which is odd, because I also rate it highly. To me, this is one of those more experimental writings. It feels very literary, and you have to concentrate a lot to read it. Plot isn't really the point in this story. It's about character--and the characterisation is phenomenal. Rooney really paints vivid pictures of all her characters. They feel real and I felt connected at times to them, but there was also this incredible distance, like I could never truly understand them. And it was this balance between being kept close and being pushed away that really kept me coming back to the story.
The prose was challenging at times. I was in hospital at some of the points when I was dipping into this story, and I did skim-read a lot of the letters in this story, because I found I was preferring the 'present day' action, rather than when Alice and Eileen write to each other. The topics they talk about are quite 'high-brow', and I found some of this difficult to concentrate on, particularly when I wanted a light read and entertainment.
The writing craft is amazing though. There are so many amazing paragraphs to analyse. It's a story about friendship and relationships, about growing up and being an adult, about love and loss and moving forward, about expectations and societal pressure, about climate change and politics, about mental health, and about what it means to be human.
View all my reviews
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