Beautiful world where are you книга

03.09.202203.09.2022 admin 0 Comments

Beautiful world where are you книга

Пока западные букблогеры дружно нацепили желтые панамки и празднуют выход новой книги Салли Руни «Beautiful World, Where Are You?», российским читателям остается только терпеливо ждать — издательство «Синдбад» обещает выпустить роман в переводе Анны Бабяшкиной в 2022 году. Зато у нас есть время разобраться: с чего вдруг вокруг Салли Руни столько шума, почему одни считают ее чуть ли не литературной иконой, а другие искренне не понимают, что все в ней нашли.

Книги о нормальных людях

Первые романы Салли Руни — «Разговоры с друзьями» и «Нормальные люди» — разошлись миллионными тиражами. Принадлежность к числу поклонников Руни стала своеобразным символом статуса для миллениалов. Молодая ирландская писательница нащупала «нерв» поколения Y, внешне вполне благополучного, но глубоко тревожного внутри. Ее герои пытаются найти свое место в мире, где привычные паттерны отношений уходят в прошлое — а новые еще не успели прижиться, где устоявшийся алгоритм уже не сулит счастья, а новым даже не пахнет. Казалось бы, перед ними открыты тысячи путей — но страх ошибиться, не оправдать ожидания сковывает их по рукам и ногам. И вот они рефлексируют, самовыражаются, ищут ответ в себе, в других людях, а главное — признают свои слабости. Благодаря таким героям романы Руни становятся слегка мутноватым зеркалом, в которое не страшно заглянуть. Сдержанные, без нарочитой вычурности и многословия, они привлекают своей «понятностью» и тем, что ничего от тебя не ждут. С ними спокойно — а нам, миллениалам, только этого и нужно.

Прекрасный мир, где же ты?

«Мы с тобой — невезучие дети, рожденные перед концом света». Главные героини третьего романа Салли Руни «Прекрасный мир, где же ты?» — лучшие подруги Элис и Эйлин. Им скоро исполнится тридцать, и они сходятся в том, что крах человеческой цивилизации не за горами, красота мертва, искусство превратилось в товар, а роман как литературный жанр себя изжил. Эти умные ирландские марксистки подружились еще в колледже, и жизнь каждой в напоминает жизнь самой Руни. Элис — невероятно успешная молодая писательница, а Эйлин работает в литературном журнале и получает смешные деньги. Элис знакомится с кладовщиком Феликсом и предлагает ему поехать в Рим. А Эйлин в Дублине приходит в себя после разрыва и начинает с интересом поглядывать на Саймона, которого знает с детства.

Все четверо молоды, но жизнь уже наступает им на пятки. Они хотят друг друга, обманывают друг друга, сходятся и расстаются. Они занимаются сексом, беспокоятся о сексе, друзьях и мире, в котором живут. Пишут друг другу километровые электронные письма, в которых задаются вопросом: действительно ли они стоят в последней освещенной комнате перед кромешной темнотой?

Найдут ли они способ поверить в прекрасный мир? Почитаем — узнаем.

Источник

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Sally Rooney

Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends.

Лучшая рецензия на книгу

18 июня 2022 г. 18:38

4 замечайте, когда вы счастливы!

Beautiful world, where are you?

Пожалуй, именно таким вопросом задаются герои этой книги. Есть положительный момент для тех, кто не любит запоминать всех героев. Здесь их всего четыре. Две девушки и два парня около 30. Этим книга мне и оказалась близка, что герои немного старше меня и живут в одно время (в конце книги герои живут в ковидный локдаун)

Мне понравилось, что нет какого-то положительного героя, герои обычные люди, даже можно сказать обычные страдающие люди. Но в каких-то моментах их страдания, их излишняя саморефлексия и их самоедство начинают раздражать. Герои задаются все теми же вопросами, как жить собственно эту жизнь и что делать? Параллельно они размышляют о судьбе всего мира и какое будущее ждёт всех людей. Если в начале герои представлены как обыденно живущие свою жизнь,…

Источник

Прекрасный мир, где же ты

Салли Руни

Успешная тридцатилетняя писательница Элис знакомится с Феликсом, который работает на складе, и предлагает ему поехать с ней в Рим. Ее лучшая подруга Эйлин в Дублине приходит в себя после разрыва отношений и начинает с интересом поглядывать на Саймона, которого знает с детства.

Все четверо молоды, но жизнь уже наступает им на пятки. Они хотят друг друга, обманывают друг друга, сходятся и расстаются. Они занимаются сексом, беспокоятся о сексе, друзьях и мире, в котором живут. Действительно ли они стоят в последней освещенной комнате перед кромешной темнотой? Найдут ли они способ поверить в прекрасный мир?

Лучшая рецензия на книгу

18 июня 2022 г. 18:38

4 замечайте, когда вы счастливы!

Beautiful world, where are you?

Источник

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Sally Rooney

9 марта 2022 г. 11:22

Салли Руни позиционируют как писательницу о человеческих страстях и проблемах. Считается, что она свежо и ново пишет о сексе, о подростках и подростковом сексе. И о сексе взрослых людей.

Вот честно, я не знаю, может, американские подростки и взрослые (в штатах Руни очень популярна) как-то сильно отличаются от наших, но описания всех этих штук мне не нравятся категорически. Свежести и новшества я не вижу вовсе.

Конкретно об этой книге: если вам нужна интрига и внятный финал – мимо. Гг – альтер-эго Руни – писательница с милионным счетом. Я не поняла, зачем был нужен этот персонаж. Все остальные страдают и мучаются рефлексией, ведя длиннющие диалоги и переписки о своих страданиях.

Может я конечно чего-то не поняла, но меня вообще не зацепило. Ну или проблемы, описанные в книге, мне просто…

17 января 2022 г. 15:13

я просто это сформулирую, чтобы в будущем обращаться.

мои отношения с салли руни выглядят так:

_ сначала я ее не дочитала, потому что просто забыла о ее существовании,

_ потом я увидела, что она выходит на русском, и осознала, что у меня из головы вылетело, что я начала писать о ней отзыв — В ОКТЯБРЕ.

а еще, когда ее выбрали для чтения в книжном клубе, я попросила подарить мне эл. копию, потому что мне жалко было десять евро на покупку своей.

с этим разобрались, давайте вытащу пару мыслей из того недописанного отзыва и пойду жить свою жизнь дальше.

какое же это удовольствие, когда книги писательницы обозначаются через «последняя салли руни», «новая салли руни» — это признак большой популярности и финансовой успешности, и меня это ужасно радует!

(и да, я понятия не имела, как называется…

7 января 2022 г. 20:13

4 Руни сильна в описании статики, но не динамики отношений

Эксперт Лайвлиба Без ложной скромности

27 сентября 2021 г. 14:55

4 Где все мы будем счастливы когда-нибудь

16 сентября 2021 г. 14:09

Салли Руни написала очень хорошую повесть и серию так себе эссе на волнующие ее темы: про религию и веру, про современные романы, про отношения-сношения, про жизнь в пандемию, про пластик. К сожалению, Салли пока не получила даже номинацию на Пулитцера, поэтому отдельный сборник эссе никто издавать не будет, а повести, видимо, недостаточно по контракту с издательством. Запихнули все перечисленное в один роман, растянув хорошую повесть во времени и пространстве.

Персонажи — худшая часть книги. Они совершенно одинаковые и представляют собой набор клише, с которым трудно себя ассоциировать. Элис (сама Салли в белом парике) писательница-миллионерша, Эйлин работает за гроши на работе, которую не ненавидит и уходит домой до 6 вечера. Да где это видано? Про Саймона вообще молчу — он добрый…

1 октября 2021 г. 15:38

3 сентября 2021 г. 11:16

Эх, когда-нибудь Салли Руни вырастет и перестанет писать одну и ту же историю про себя в разных вариациях, и вот тогда я ее сразу как полюблю. А пока не могу, извините.

Два красивых образа, несколько интересных мыслей о жизни и религии и проставлены галочки во всех актуальных социальных строчках. Но всё деревянное.

20 сентября 2021 г. 16:41

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Beautiful world where are you книга

A Note About the Author

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

When I write something I usually think it is very important and that I am a very fine writer. I think this happens to everyone. But there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer. I swear I know it. But that doesn’t matter much to me.

‘My Vocation’ (translated by Dick Davis)

A woman sat in a hotel bar, watching the door. Her appearance was neat and tidy: white blouse, fair hair tucked behind her ears. She glanced at the screen of her phone, on which was displayed a messaging interface, and then looked back at the door again. It was late March, the bar was quiet, and outside the window to her right the sun was beginning to set over the Atlantic. It was four minutes past seven, and then five, six minutes past. Briefly and with no perceptible interest she examined her fingernails. At eight minutes past seven, a man entered through the door. He was slight and dark-haired, with a narrow face. He looked around, scanning the faces of the other patrons, and then took his phone out and checked the screen. The woman at the window noticed him but, beyond watching him, made no additional effort to catch his attention. They appeared to be about the same age, in their late twenties or early thirties. She let him stand there until he saw her and came over.

Are you Alice? he said.

That’s me, she replied.

Yeah, I’m Felix. Sorry I’m late.

In a gentle tone she replied: That’s alright. He asked her what she wanted to drink and then went to the bar to order. The waitress asked how he was getting on, and he answered: Good yeah, yourself? He ordered a vodka tonic and a pint of lager. Rather than carrying the bottle of tonic back to the table, he emptied it into the glass with a quick and practised movement of his wrist. The woman at the table tapped her fingers on a beermat, waiting. Her outward attitude had become more alert and lively since the man had entered the room. She looked outside now at the sunset as if it were of interest to her, though she hadn’t paid any attention to it before. When the man returned and put the drinks down, a drop of lager spilled over and she watched its rapid progress down the side of his glass.

You were saying you just moved here, he said. Is that right?

She nodded, sipped her drink, licked her top lip.

What did you do that for? he asked.

I mean, there’s not much in the way of people moving here, usually. People moving away from here, that would be more the normal thing. You’re hardly here for work, are you?

A momentary glance between them seemed to confirm that he was expecting more of an explanation. Her expression flickered, as if she were trying to make a decision, and then she gave a little informal, almost conspiratorial smile.

Well, I was looking to move somewhere anyway, she said, and then I heard about a house just outside town here—a friend of mine knows the owners. Apparently they’ve been trying to sell it forever and eventually they just started looking for someone to live there in the meantime. Anyway, I thought it would be nice to live beside the sea. I suppose it was a bit impulsive, really. So—But that’s the entire story, there was no other reason.

He was drinking and listening to her. Toward the end of her remarks she seemed to have become slightly nervous, which expressed itself in a shortness of breath and a kind of self-mocking expression. He watched this performance impassively and then put his glass down.

Right, he said. And you were in Dublin before, was it?

Different places. I was in New York for a while. I’m from Dublin, I think I told you that. But I was living in New York until last year.

And what are you going to do now you’re here? Look for work or something?

She paused. He smiled and sat back in his seat, still looking at her.

Sorry for all the questions, he said. I don’t think I get the full story yet.

No, I don’t mind. But I’m not very good at giving answers, as you can see.

What do you work as, then? That’s my last question.

She smiled back at him, tightly now. I’m a writer, she said. Why don’t you tell me what you do?

Ah, it’s not as unusual as that. I wonder what you write about, but I won’t ask. I work in a warehouse, outside town.

Well, doing what, he repeated philosophically. Collecting orders off the shelves and putting them in a trolley and then bringing them up to be packed. Nothing too exciting.

Don’t you like it, then?

She smiled and said that was true. Outside the window the sky had grown darker, and the lights down at the caravan park were coming on: the cool salt glow of the outdoor lamps, and the warmer yellow lights in the windows. The waitress from behind the bar had come out to mop down the empty tables with a cloth. The woman named Alice watched her for a few seconds and then looked at the man again.

So what do people do for fun around here? she asked.

It’s the same as any place. Few pubs around. Nightclub down in Ballina, that’s about twenty minutes in the car. And we have the amusements, obviously, but that’s more for the kids. I suppose you don’t really have friends around here yet, do you?

I think you’re the first person I’ve had a conversation with since I moved in.

He raised his eyebrows. Are you shy? he said.

They looked at one another. She no longer looked nervous now, but somehow remote, while his eyes moved around her face, as if trying to put something together. He did not seem in the end, after a second or two, to conclude that he had succeeded.

I think you might be, he said.

She asked where he was living and he said he was renting a house with friends, nearby. Looking out the window, he added that the estate was almost visible from where they were sitting, just past the caravan park. He leaned over the table to show her, but then said it was too dark after all. Anyway, just the other side there, he said. As he leaned close to her their eyes met. She dropped her gaze into her lap, and taking his seat again he seemed to suppress a smile. She asked if his parents were still living locally. He said his mother had passed away the year before and that his father was ‘God knows where’.

I mean, to be fair, he’s probably somewhere like Galway, he added. He’s not going to turn up down in Argentina or anything. But I haven’t seen him in years.

I’m so sorry about your mother, she said.

I actually haven’t seen my father in a while either. He’s—not very reliable.

Felix looked up from his glass. Oh? he said. Drinker, is he?

Mm. And he— You know, he makes up stories.

Felix nodded. I thought that was your job, he said.

She blushed visibly at this remark, which seemed to take him by surprise and even alarm him. Very funny, she said. Anyway. Would you like another drink?

After the second, they had a third. He asked if she had siblings and she said one, a younger brother. He said he had a brother too. By the end of the third
drink Alice’s face looked pink and her eyes had become glassy and bright. Felix looked exactly the same as he had when he had entered the bar, no change in manner or tone. But while her gaze increasingly roamed around the room, expressing a more diffuse interest in her surroundings, the attention he paid to her had become more watchful and intent. She rattled the ice in her empty glass, amusing herself.

Would you like to see my house? she asked. I’ve been wanting to show it off but I don’t know anyone to invite. I mean, I am going to invite my friends, obviously. But they’re all over the place.

Whereabouts is the house? he said. Can we walk there?

Most certainly we can. In fact we’ll have to. I can’t drive, can you?

Not right now, no. Or I wouldn’t chance it, anyway. But I do have my licence, yeah.

Do you, she murmured. How romantic. Do you want another, or shall we go?

He frowned to himself at this question, or at the phrasing of the question, or at the use of the word ‘romantic’. She was rooting in her handbag without looking up.

Yeah, let’s head on, why not, he said.

She stood up and began to put on her jacket, a beige single-breasted raincoat. He watched her fold back one sleeve cuff to match the other. Standing upright, he was only just taller than she was.

How far is it? he said.

She smiled at him playfully. Are you having second thoughts? she said. If you get tired of walking you can always abandon me and turn back, I’m quite used to it. The walk, that is. Not being abandoned. I might be used to that as well, but it’s not the sort of thing I confess to strangers.

To this he offered no reply at all, just nodded, with a vaguely grim expression of forbearance, as if this aspect of her personality, her tendency to be ‘witty’ and verbose, was, after an hour or two of conversation, a quality he had noted and determined to ignore. He said goodnight to the waitress as they left. Alice looked struck by this, and glanced back over her shoulder as if trying to catch sight of the woman again. When they were outside on the footpath, she asked whether he knew her. The tide broke in a low soothing rush behind them and the air was cold.

The girl working there? said Felix. I know her, yeah. Sinead. Why?

She’ll wonder what you were doing in there talking to me.

In a flat tone, Felix replied: I’d say she’d have a fair idea. Where are we heading?

Alice put her hands in the pockets of her raincoat and started walking up the hill. She seemed to have recognised a kind of challenge or even repudiation in his tone, and rather than cowing her, it was as though it had hardened her resolve.

Why, do you often meet women there? she asked.

He had to walk quickly to keep up with her. That’s an odd question, he replied.

Is it? I suppose I’m an odd person.

Is it your business if I meet people there? he said.

Nothing about you is my business, naturally. I’m just curious.

He seemed to consider this, and in the meantime repeated in a quieter, less certain voice: Yeah, but I don’t see how it’s your business. After a few seconds he added: You’re the one who suggested the hotel. Just for your information. I never usually go there. So no, I don’t meet people there that much. Okay?

That’s okay, that’s fine. My curiosity was piqued by your remark about the girl behind the bar ‘having an idea’ what we were doing there.

Well, I’m sure she figured out we were on a date, he said. That’s all I meant.

Though she didn’t look around at him, Alice’s face started to show a little more amusement than before, or a different kind of amusement. You don’t mind people you know seeing you out on dates with strangers? she asked.

You mean because it’s awkward or whatever? Wouldn’t bother me much, no.

For the rest of the walk to Alice’s house, up along the coast road, they made conversation about Felix’s social life, or rather Alice posed a number of queries on the subject which he mulled over and answered, both parties speaking more loudly than before due to the noise of the sea. He expressed no surprise at her questions, and answered them readily, but without speaking at excessive length or offering any information beyond what was directly solicited. He told her that he socialised primarily with people he had known in school and people he knew from work. The two circles overlapped a little but not much. He didn’t ask her anything in return, perhaps warned off by her diffident responses to the questions he’d posed earlier, or perhaps no longer interested.

Just here, she said eventually.

She unlatched a small white gate and said: Here. He stopped walking and looked at the house, situated up a length of sloped green garden. None of the windows were lit, and the facade of the house was not visible in any great detail, but his expression indicated that he knew where they were.

You live in the rectory? he said.

Oh, I didn’t realise you would know it. I would have told you at the bar, I wasn’t trying to be mysterious.

She was holding the gate open for him, and, with his eyes still on the figure of the house, which loomed above them facing out onto the sea, he followed her. Around them the dim green garden rustled in the wind. She walked lightly up the path and searched in her handbag for the house keys. The noise of the keys was audible somewhere inside the bag but she didn’t seem to be able to find them. He stood there not saying anything. She apologised for the delay and switched on the torch function on her phone, lighting the interior of her bag and casting a cold grey light on the front steps of the house also. He had his hands in his pockets. Got them, she said. Then she unlocked the door.

Inside was a large hallway with red-and-black patterned floor tiles. A marbled glass lampshade hung overhead, and a delicate, spindly table along the wall displayed a wooden carving of an otter. She dumped her keys on the table and glanced quickly in the dim, blotchy mirror on the wall.

You’re renting this place on your own? he said.

I know, she said. It’s much too big, obviously. And I’m spending millions on keeping it warm. But it is nice, isn’t it? And they’re not charging me any rent. Shall we go in the kitchen? I’ll turn the heat back on.

He followed her down a hallway into a large kitchen, with fixed units along one side and a dining table on the other. Over the sink was a window overlooking the back garden. He stood in the doorway while she went searching in one of the presses. She looked around at him.

You can sit down if you’d like to, she said. But by all means remain standing if it’s what you prefer. Will you have a glass of wine? It’s the only thing I have in the house, drinks-wise. But I’m going to have a glass of water first.

What kind of things do you write? If you’re a writer.

She turned around, bemused. If I am? she said. I don’t suppose you think I’ve been lying. I would have come up with something better if I had been. I’m a novelist. I write books.

And you make money doing that, do you?

As if sensing a new significance in this question, she glanced at him once more and then went back to pouring the water. Yes I do, she said. He continued to watch her and then sat down at the table. The seats were padded with cushions in crinkled russet cloth. Everything looked very clean. He rubbed the smooth tabletop with the tip of his index finger. She put a glass of water down in front of him and sat on one of the chairs.

Have you been here before? she said. You knew the house.

No, I only know it from growing up in town. I never knew who lived here.

I hardly know them myself. An older couple. The woman is an artist, I think.

He nodded and said nothing.

I’ll give you a tour if you like, she added.

He still said nothing and this time didn’t even nod. She didn’t look perturbed by this; it seemed to confirm some suspicion she had been nursing, and when she continued to speak it was in the same dry, almost sardonic tone.

/> You must think I’m mad living here on my own, she said.

In response to this abrupt question she did not move her eyes at first, but kept staring intently at her glass for a few seconds before looking directly up at him. Upstairs, she said. They’re all upstairs. Would you like me to show you?

They rose from the table. On the upstairs landing was a Turkish rug with grey tassels. Alice pushed open the door to her room and switched on a little floor lamp. To the left was a large double bed. The floorboards were bare and along one wall a fireplace was laid out in jade-coloured tiles. On the right, a large sash window looked out over the sea, into the darkness. Felix wandered over to the window and leaned close to the glass, so his own shadow darkened the glare of the reflected light.

Must be a nice view here in the daytime, said Felix.

Alice was still standing by the door. Yes, it’s beautiful, she said. Even better in the evening, actually.

He turned away from the window, casting his appraising glance around the room’s other features, while Alice watched.

Very nice, he concluded. Very nice room. Are you going to write a book while you’re here?

And what are your books about?

Oh, I don’t know, she said. People.

That’s a bit vague. What kind of people do you write about, people like you?

She looked at him calmly, as if to tell him something: that she understood his game, perhaps, and that she would even let him win it, as long as he played nicely.

What kind of person do you think I am? she said.

Something in the calm coolness of her look seemed to unsettle him, and he gave a quick, yelping laugh. Well, well, he said. I only met you a few hours ago, I haven’t made up my mind on you yet.

Источник

Кто такая Салли Руни и почему о ней все говорят

7 сентября в Британии выходит третья книга молодой ирландской писательницы Салли Руни, ставшей всемирно известной после того, как BBC экранизировал ее роман «Нормальные люди». ZIMA рассказывает, в чем феномен Руни и почему ее так любят миллениалы.

В апреле 2020 года, в самый разгар пандемии, на BBC вышел мини-сериал «Нормальные люди» по одноименному роману Салли Руни, тогда еще не слишком известной ирландской писательницы. После первых же восторженных отзывов заинтригованные зрители, которые с Руни еще знакомы не были, бросились смотреть экранизацию, а затем – читать ее книги (или наоборот). В итоге, в концу года «Нормальные люди» собрали на BBC iPlayer более 62 млн просмотров. Зрители с трепетом наблюдали за трогательной историей отношений двух друзей, Коннелла и Марианны — сначала школьников, потом студентов, — предоставившей им возможности вспомнить времена своих первых влюбленностей и юношеского максимализма.

Популярность сериала была феноменальной, и количество поклонников Салли Руни и ее героев начало расти в геометрической прогрессии. Фанаты даже создали отдельный аккаунт в Instagram, посвященный украшению, которое носил главный герой «Нормальных людей», – серебрянной цепочке (страничка набрала более 160 тыс. фолловеров). А потом затаились в ожидании новой книги.

И вот, наконец, в январе 2021 года The Guardian, The New York Times и другие издания объявили, что новый роман ирландской писательницы «Прекрасный мир, где ты» появится на полках книжных магазинов в сентябре этого года. С тех пор Салли Руни вновь в центре внимания прессы. Личная жизнь автора, ее политические взгляды и произведения — все активно обсуждается мировыми СМИ.

Кто такая Салли Руни

Салли Руни родилась в небольшом ирландском городе Каслбар в 1991 году и росла в период экономического бума, что отразилось на политических взглядах (и материальном положении) ее семьи. В интервью Руни часто признается, что считает себя марксисткой, а ее жизненные ценности — это, в первую очередь, заслуга родителей-социалистов. «Они оба заставили меня страстно верить в равенство людей, — призналась ирландка в недавнем интервью газете The Irish Times. — Но они были нормальными родителями, которые работали каждый день, пытаясь вырастить троих маленьких детей. Они не усаживали нас по вечерам и не заставляли читать отрывки из «Манифеста коммунистической партии» или чего-то в этом роде. Я училась на их примере — жить по своим принципам, и я надеюсь, что стараюсь жить по своим».

В начале 2000-х Ирландия изменилась до неузнаваемости и обошла по уровню дохода не только континентальную Европу, но и соседскую Британию. Литературные критики предполагают, что образ Ирландии — уютной, практически сказочной страны — писательница до сих пор заимствует из своих детских воспоминаний. Ее герои редко заботятся о деньгах, вернее, деньги к ним приходят легко, будь то баснословные гонорары за публикации рассказов или работа в кофейне, — миллениалы не сфокусированы на богатстве, но и не страдают от бедности.

Обложка: ELLIUS GRACE/NYT

К тому моменту, как Руни поступила в Тринити-колледж, страна уже столкнулась с последствиями глобального финансового кризиса 2008 года – и ирландскому экономическому чуду пришел конец. Впрочем, это только укрепило политические взгляды будущей писательницы. В университете она получила степень магистра американской литературы и познакомилась со своим будущим мужем Джоном Прасифкой. Правда, о нем прессе практически ничего не известно. Зато точно известно, что литературная карьера Салли Руни началась именно в студенческий период. Еще в Тринити-колледже она написала свое первое эссе «Даже если ты победишь меня», которое сразу заметили агенты. Так или иначе, к моменту публикации первого романа Руни «Разговоры с друзьями» за сотрудничество с ней боролись уже семь издателей.

«Разговоры с друзьями»

«Разговоры с друзьями» — первый роман Салли Руни, который рассказывает о двух подругах, начинающей писательнице Фрэнсис и не до конца определившейся с профессией бисексуалке Бобби. Бок о бок они переживают типичные юношеские проблемы: безответную любовь, неожиданную ненависть, непринятия себя и ссоры с родителями. На одном из поэтических вечеров девушки знакомятся с супружеской парой — Мелиссой и Ником — и неожиданно для себя заводят роман. Правда, Мелисса и Бобби быстро из него выпадают. А вот Фрэнсис и Ник никак не могут определиться в своих чувствах — ни к себе, ни к другим.

Руни в своем романе концентрируется не столько на сюжете (поэтому спойлеров можно не опасаться), сколько на чувствах и ощущениях. Персонажи постоянно пытаются анализировать собственные эмоции: если они смогут до конца понять, что чувствуют и почему, эмоции больше не будут причинять им боль, но раз за разом герои терпят поражение. Часто что-то идет не так, и тогда они чувствуют себя одновременно шокированными и преданными.

«Я обычно создаю персонажей, которые примерно так же проницательны, как и я, в отношении того, что они думают и чувствуют, — рассказывала Руни журналу New Yorker в 2019 году. — Они проницательны, но чаще крайне неспособны описать или объяснить то, что реально происходит в их жизни».

Книги Руни — это болтливые подруги, которых ты сначала долго выслушиваешь, затем с ними молчишь, а потом не даешь бесполезные советы, как вести себя дальше.

«Нормальные люди»

Второй роман писательницы, «Нормальные люди», вышел через год после первой книги — в 2018-м. С тех пор он был продан тиражом более трех миллионов экземпляров, номинирован на Букеровскую премию, переведен на 46 языков и принес Салли Руни более £4 млн. А экранизация «Нормальных людей» на BBC стала самой транслируемой программой телеканала в 2020 году.

И «Нормальные люди», и «Разговоры с друзьями» имеют что-то общее в ДНК. Оба романа рассказывают о молодых ирландских интеллектуалах, обучающихся в Тринити-колледже, и их драматических перипетиях. Но если «Разговоры с друзьями» — это любовный четырехугольник, то «Нормальные люди» — почти классическая романтическая история, происходящая между девушкой Марианной и парнем Коннеллом, которые знакомы со школьных времен. Как и Фрэнсис из «Разговоров с друзьями», индивидуалистка Марианна чувствует внешнее общественное давление — дихотомию, которую в той или иной степени испытывает большинство современных молодых людей. Она переживает динамичные и непонятные ей отношения, ощущает себя уязвимой и эмоционально зависимой от партнеров — будь то Коннелл или случайный любовник.

Кадр из фильма «Нормальные люди»

«Нормальные люди» снова поразили читателей своей простой и размеренностью. Возможно, секрет сюжетов Руни кроется в проницательности, трогательности и честности, которая пробуждает интерес к чтению даже у тех, кто раньше ограничивался лишь новостной лентой в Instagram.

«Прекрасный мир, где ты»

Новую книгу поклонники Руни ждали несколько лет. И пока она, в основном, получает восторженные отзывы. Одни сравнивают Руни с Марселем Прустом, другие называют ее «Сэлинджером для миллениалов», третьи видят в ней Джейн Остин, облаченную в современные декорации, и ассоциируют с расцветом современной ирландской литературы.

В романе «Прекрасный мир, где ты?» (Beautiful World, Where Are You) Руни вновь рассказывает близкую ей историю четырех молодых уроженцев Ирландии, которые борются с выпавшими на их долю невзгодами. Молодая писательница Элис встречает парня по имени Феликс и уезжает с ним в Рим, в то время как ее подруга Эйлин после тяжелого разрыва заводит роман с Саймоном, которого знает с детства. Друзья обмениваются электронными письмами — говорят об искусстве, дружбе, окружающем мире и сложных любовных связях, разворачивающихся в их собственной жизни, и планируют новую встречу.

«Я не умею придумывать с нуля реальный мир, такой как работа, дом, социальные круги, — объясняет Салли Руни журналисту ирландской газеты, отвечая на вопрос о героях нового романа. — Материальная реальность персонажей должна быть основана на вещах, которые я действительно знаю. По той же причине все мои персонажи ирландцы. Я ирландка. Я живу в Ирландии. Большинство моих друзей — ирландцы. Я чувствую себя более уверенно в этой реальности, я не пытаюсь ее скрыть. Я абсолютно точно говорю о вещах, которые происходят непосредственно в моей собственной жизни».

Книга поступит в продажу в британские и ирландские магазины с 7 сентября. Кроме того, в ближайший уикенд — с 10 по 12 сентября — в столичном районе Шордич откроется поп-ап магазин, где ее можно будет приобрести.

Источник

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Салли Руни

Лучшая рецензия на книгу

18 июня 2022 г. 18:38

4 замечайте, когда вы счастливы!

Beautiful world, where are you?

Источник

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Салли Руни

9 марта 2022 г. 11:22

Может я конечно чего-то не поняла, но меня вообще не зацепило. Ну или проблемы, описанные в книге, мне просто…

17 января 2022 г. 15:13

я просто это сформулирую, чтобы в будущем обращаться.

мои отношения с салли руни выглядят так:

_ сначала я ее не дочитала, потому что просто забыла о ее существовании,

с этим разобрались, давайте вытащу пару мыслей из того недописанного отзыва и пойду жить свою жизнь дальше.

(и да, я понятия не имела, как называется…

7 января 2022 г. 20:13

4 Руни сильна в описании статики, но не динамики отношений

Эксперт Лайвлиба Без ложной скромности

27 сентября 2021 г. 14:55

4 Где все мы будем счастливы когда-нибудь

16 сентября 2021 г. 14:09

1 октября 2021 г. 15:38

3 сентября 2021 г. 11:16

20 сентября 2021 г. 16:41

Источник

Beautiful World, Where Are You
(Review, Synopsis & Summary)

By Sally Rooney

Book review and synopsis for Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney, sally Rooney’s latest modern day romance.

Synopsis

In Beautiful World, Where Are You, 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.

Detailed Plot Summary

The one-paragraph version: Alice and Eileen are best friends from college, both 29 or 30-ish. Alice is a successful novelist who has recently had a nervous breakdown. She starts seeing Felix, a warehouse worker she met off Tinder. Meanwhile, Eileen is an editorial assistant at a literary magazine in Dublin. She starts a casual relationship with Simon, a handsome childhood friend. Felix initially resists a relationship with Alice, saying that she likes him behaving poorly towards her so that she can be morally superior. Simon, too, doesn’t really pursue Eileen (even though he has always loved her), saying that she pushes people away. Alice and Eileen also have tension in their friendship, since each feels they care more than the other does. In the end, both couples (and the women) are able to be more vulnerable with one another. The couples end up together and the women forge a stronger friendship.

The book opens in a village a few hours away from Dublin with Alice Kelleher meeting a man from Tinder, Felix Brady, at a bar. Alice is a novelist who is new in town and who has published a successful book, and Felix is a warehouse worker. The date is awkward and the two don’t quite hit it off.

Meanwhile, in Dublin, Eileen Lydon (Alice’s best friend), 29, meets up with a family friend, Simon Costigan, for coffee. Eileen is an editorial assistant at a literary magazine. Eileen was a social outcast in primary and secondary school, and her older sister Lola was mean to her. Simon (who is 5 years older than her) was the first person to really befriend her when she was a teenager. Later, when she’s 21, she ends up sleeping with Simon after he has a bad breakup, but nothing comes of it from there. In present day, Simon tells her he’s bringing a woman he’s been seeing (Caroline) to Lola’s upcoming wedding, but he offers to go alone for Eileen’s sake if she wants.

(Throughout the book, Alice and Eileen write letters back and forth updating each other on their personal lives and detailing their thoughts on various topics. In the letters, you can see that they care about each other a lot, but that there is some unspoken tension between them as well.)

Alice and Felix later run into each other in town and Felix invites her to a party at his place so she can meet some new people. Alice attends. She ends up telling Felix about how she had a nervous breakdown a while ago which landed her in the hospital for a short time. She also impulsively invites Felix on a work trip to Rome, offering to pay for everything since he can’t afford to go otherwise.

In Rome, Felix says to Alice that he knows she’s in love with him. They later have a heart-to-heart where they each admit bad things they’ve done in the past, and Felix tells Alice that he likes her. They sleep together.

Meanwhile, in Dublin, Eileen and Simon continue hanging out and hooking up. However, they go to party where some else is flirting with Simon, where people are joking about how Simon likes younger women and they’re talking about how great Caroline is. Eileen gets upset about all of it and leaves. Simon follows her and they argue. Simon says that he’s asked her out before and she wasn’t interested. It wasn’t until he started seeing Caroline that she started wanting to sleep with him. Simon and Eileen decide to go back to be just being friends.

A while after returning from Rome, Alice and Felix finally see each other again. Felix has «ghosted» Alice since the trip, and Alice is upset with him. Felix says he’s not looking for any «big commitments». Alice is fine with it as long as he doesn’t ghost her again. They start casually seeing each other. One day, Felix admits that he’s not known as the most reliable guy around town and has debts, but he reassures her that he won’t be asking her for money. Later, they get into an argument when Felix accuses Alice of liking it when he «acts badly» towards her since it puts her morally above him, which is where she likes to be. Still, they keep seeing each other.

In June, Eileen and Simon see each other again at Lola’s wedding and it reawakens their feelings for one another. Afterwards, they both head to Alice’s place since they’d previously arranged to go see Alice. The first day there is idyllic with Felix hanging out with the three of them and Alice feeling very happy to have them all there. Simon also reveals that he broke up with Caroline because he was in love with Eileen.

Eventually, the two women also end up confronting the tension in their relationship. Eileen has some resentment over Alice’s wealth and lifestyle. Both women also feel that they care more about the other person than vice versa. Afterwards, the two men comfort their respective partners and remind each of the women of how much the other cares for them. Felix says that Alice seems to think no one cares about her, even when they do. Simon also tells Eileen that he has always loved her, but she makes it hard for people like him and Alice to express their feelings to her because she pushes them away before they can.

The book ends with Alice and Eileen making up. It then jumps forward 18 months and we see that both couples are still together. (The pandemic is going on now.) Eileen has just found out that she’s pregnant and she’s very happy about it.

Book Review

Beautiful World, Where Are You is Sally Rooney’s latest release, which has book clubs abuzz with excitement or irritation, depending on how you feel about her. She’s become somewhat of a controversial figure with some people absolutely loving her bleak modern-day romances and others bemoaning her writing and angrily denouncing what they view as an undeserved literary status.

While I’m not really a Sally Rooney fan, I also don’t like to tell people what the “should” or “should not” enjoy. (I realize this seems to contrary to being someone who reviews books, but my goal is to help lead people to books they might enjoy, not to tell people what they must or must not like.)

Anyway, in Beautiful World, Where Are You, Sally Rooney continues her Tumultuous Relationships book series (beginning with her first two novels Conversations with Friends and Normal People), whereby young women chase after their respective love interests, resulting in miscommunications, too many things left unsaid and strained will-they-or-won’t-they scenarios.

Here, Rooney’s novel is centered about the romantic exploits of two best friends, Alice and Eileen. Alice is a novelist with one successful book under her belt, but she’s also recently had a nervous breakdown that landed her in a psychiatric facility for a short time. Eileen is beautiful and works as an assistant at a literary magazine. Alice is busy pursuing Felix, a working-class man she has recently met on Tinder. While Eileen is pursuing her old crush, a handsome family friend named Simon.

Like her first two books, the story is told with a focus on the women, and the narrative is centered around the push and pull of their relationships. The relationships here are similar in some ways to the ones in her previous books, but not carbon copies. Meanwhile, cursory discussions of things like political philosophy, art and other high-brow topics are scattered throughout the book.

I was glad to find that Beautiful World is a more mature book than her two prior novels. The two female protagonists write letters back and forth, which provides an Rooney with the opportunity to provide some perspective on the characters’ mindsets and sometimes a counterpoint to the other character’s comments.

For example, in one instance, the over-romanticized way that Eileen describes a night spent with Simon in a letter to Alice contrasts starkly with the sad, somewhat desperate way the events are actually narrated in the book. In other instances, the two women call each other out, such as when the other seems to be wallowing in self-pity or is making questionable decisions. I often feel like the epistolary form in novels ends up being a little gimmicky, but here Rooney really makes good use of it.

There’s also less of an obsession with being “cool” and “popular” than was seen in Rooney’s prior novels (which really irked me about those first two books). It’s not entirely gone — Rooney still feels the need to make clear what each woman’s social standing was at various points in their life and she repeats the same template of having a character who was a social outcast in high school being very popular in college. However, it’s more of an aside than something that’s harked on though-out the book.

Instead, in Beautiful World, Rooney spends more time on things like Simon’s Catholicism, ruminations about the current state of politics, the publishing industry, thoughts about the women’s careers and other more topics. Though these discussions are often more of a reflection of the characters’ mindsets at the time than an attempt to address these things substantively.

I should mention that many of Rooney’s writing habits that don’t sit well with me are still very much present as well. There is an element of repetitiveness in her novels with all her female characters seeming like slight variations of the same person. There’s so much pretension at every turn. There’s still no punctuation. The relationship dynamics have a sameness to them, even if there are slight variations. There’s also the same victim complex that permeates her protagonists.

Read it or Skip it?

The short version: Beautiful World, Where Are You is a more mature novel and represents growth for Sally Rooney as a writer, but it still feels like more of the same as well.

The longer version: I think fans of Rooney’s prior novels will love this book, and I do think it’s in some ways a stronger novel than her previous ones. Some people who disliked the first two books could consider giving this one a chance to see if Beautiful World appeals to you more, especially if you were someone who was on the fence about her (as opposed to outright loathing the first two books).

For me, personally, I think there’s just something inherently boring about reading about people pining after someone who doesn’t love/like them enough or isn’t mentally ready to be in a healthy relationship or people pursuing somewhat hopeless situations in general. When I was younger, I was more interested in this type of thing, seeing it as an engrossing will-they-or-won’t-they situation.

However, over time I’ve come to find the whole exercise really pointless. Ultimately, people who are lukewarm about you or too wrapped up in their own insecurities to be in a healthy relationship are just not viable prospects. My view is that unhealthy, tumultuous courtships tend to result in unhealthy, tumultuous relationships, so there’s nothing particularly romantic or sad about them ending up together or not.

Ultimately, I think Rooney will continue to elicit very divisive opinions, just because there’s things she does very well (like managing to evoke a range of very specific and relatable feelings from relationships that we’ve all had before and her careful fixation on the nuances in the interactions between people) and there’s things that will continue to irk people (how her protagonists constantly see themselves as victims of the world around them, the lack of punctuation, the similarities in the characters she writes, etc.).

Still, Beautiful World, Where Are You shows some compelling growth for her as a writer. Even if I wasn’t terribly impressed by it, I still liked it better than her first two books, and I enjoyed it enough to be curious about what she comes up with next. I think it’ll be interesting to see how her writing continues to develop.

Beautiful World, Where Are You Audiobook

Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
Length: 10 hours 3 minutes

Источник

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Где все мы будем счастливы когда-нибудь

Мир, прежде огромный и разобщенный, в последние два десятилетия невероятно уплотнился, оказался прошит множеством связей, о каких раньше и помыслить невозможно было. Изменения коснулись всех сфер. Мы больше знаем об экологической обставновке и можем по одному клику получить любую информацию. Иной уровень вовлеченности в политическую и общественную жизнь. Коренные изменения претерпевает институт семьи. Отодвинулся возраст вступления в брак и деторождения. Беспрецедентный уровень толерантности к нетрадиционным отношениям и требованиям верности.

Саймон, друг обеих девушек, но с Эйлин знаком дольше. Пятью годами старше, он жил по соседству с ее родительским домом, но принадлежит скорее к более обеспеченному и привилегированному классу джентри. Такой, умница и красавчик, который мог бы сделать блестящую карьеру и грести деньги лопатой, но предпочитает работать за куда более скромное вознаграждение в партии оппозиции. Он из тех парней, что могут сказать о себе: «Я помогал родителям Эйлин на ферме, начитавшись «Анны Карениной» и впечатлившись тем, как Лёвин работал с мужиками». А девицы у него сплошь инстаграмные красотки двадцати трех лет с семнадцатью тысячами подписчиков.

Феликс, вопреки имени, самый несчастный из четверых. Хотя, может быть и наоборот. По крайней мере, он один в книге представитель рабочего класса. Из простой семьи, работает на складе громадного интернет-магазина, вроде Амазона. Знакомится с Элис в Тиндере. Хорошо поет. Спокойный, простой, но не простоватый.

Ну вот, а дальше все закрутится с участием этой четверки. И нет, скучно не будет. Хотя очарование новизны, с которым Салли Руни ворвалась на литературный Олимп, в Beautiful World, Where Are You ощущается уже не так остро. Но книга отличная

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Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney review – the problem of success

How do you follow two brilliantly acclaimed novels? Rooney examines meaning, art, friendship and the price of fame through the story of two couples

‘Prose so clean, it reflects the readers’ prejudices right back at them’. Sally Rooney. Photograph: Linda Brownlee/The Guardian

T here has been such a lot of noise around Sally Rooney’s work, such an amount of fervour and possibly manufactured division. “The cult of Sally Rooney,” says one headline. “Why do so many people hate Sally Rooney?” asks another. The discussion cannot be about the quality of her sentences, which are impeccable, or about her tone, which is thoughtful, often sweet-minded and always rigorous. This is prose you either get or don’t get; for some it is incisive, for others banal. Which makes me wonder if it is so clean, it reflects the readers’ prejudices right back at them.

Rooney is certainly interested in accuracy: her first two novels managed to be sexually exact without being smutty, and this is an interesting trick. In its repudiation of shame, the style represents an advance of some kind, and it may be this autonomy that irritates those notional critics who are notionally male and notionally misogynistic. Also – and this really does annoy some people – Rooney writes about love.

If “romance” is one key insult here, “millennial” is another. The divergence of opinion is styled, accurately or not, as generational, and the conversation is partly about what is or is not to be taken seriously. In her first two books, Rooney wrote scrupulously about encounters that are usually seen as impermanent, and therefore a little silly: an affair and first love. The intensities of experience, so coolly described, are larger than is socially useful, as society used to be constructed. For the generation represented in these books, however, those constructions no longer hold – the young are reaping the ruin their ancestors sowed. (Jane Austen’s heroines were not troubled by apocalypse; perhaps this is why they did not pause, in love, to abhor the slave trade.)

“Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended?” In Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, Alice and Eileen are best friends, about to turn 30, who are agreed that human civilisation is facing collapse, beauty is dead, art is commodified and the novel irrelevant as a form. These smart Irish Marxists are best friends from college, and they have lives that are, in very different ways, a bit like Rooney’s own. Alice is an unfeasibly successful young writer and Eileen works for a literary magazine, earning 20 grand a year. The book interleaves their separate love stories with the long emails they send each other, in which they have much to discuss and share.

“We are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness,” says Alice, given that “there is no chance for the planet, and no chance for us.” And though Eileen agrees, she finds solace in the ordinary. “Maybe we are just born to love and worry about the people we know,” she replies. “In fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive – because we are so stupid about each other.” Alice will be stupid about Felix, a possibly dodgy guy she meets on Tinder, and Eileen will be incredibly stupid about Simon, the friend of her youth, who is gorgeous, unapproachably moral and, of all things, a Catholic.

Fans of Rooney’s previous work will relish the ache and uncertainty of her characters’ coming of age, her way with emotional difficulty and her brilliance in showing the barriers we put between ourselves and the love of others. The last third of Beautiful World, Where Are You, when the four characters meet and connect, is a tour de force. The dialogue never falters, and the prose burns up the page. It takes some time to get these people in the same room, however, and that movement towards intimacy is purposely delayed by Rooney’s descriptive prose, which heats up slowly.

We start the novel knowing nothing – even the writer seems to know nothing – about these human beings. Actions are described in microscopic detail, expressions are hard to read. People don’t go online, they “tap the icon of a social media app” and their screens take several sentences to load. One of the bravura sections in the first part of the book describes, with great flattening effect, Alice’s day promoting her book (or “being famous”) in Rome while her date, Felix, wanders the city with his phone. One person’s life, another person’s life; neither is valued, by these sentences, more than the other. Slowly, this sense of distance becomes erotically charged; people talk quietly over the phone, screens are blankly full of possibility, words thrill.

After these opaque sexual interactions, the emails between Alice and Eileen come in a rush of loquacity. The women write to each other about societal collapse, and how their lives of easy consumption are made possible by the misery of millions. They are also interested in personal goodness; in Jesus, as a written character; in the relationship between beauty and sympathy; in the uses of fiction and the emptiness of fame. Alice is questing and disillusioned, Eileen more hopeful and fretful both. Their response to existential threat is not to talk of nihilism, but of empathy, morality and love.

Both women have suffered a loss of meaning. Eileen, recovering from a breakup, has long stopped writing moments down in her journal: “the world just came to me flat, like some catalogue of information”. Alice, who landed an enormous book deal at the age of 25, has just emerged from psychiatric care. Fame has involved, for her, a radical loss of personhood. She has become something she wanted to be and now energetically despises; finding versions of herself online makes her feel she is already dead.

But the women continue to figure things out, and their new sexual relationships kindle into connection. Recently, Eileen has felt it again: “the nearness, the possibility of beauty, like a light radiating softly from behind the visible world”. Alice remembers how writing a novel made her feel “like God had put his hand on my head and filled me with the most intense desire I had ever felt … desire to bring something into being that had never existed before”.

The exposure of fame, especially sudden fame like Rooney’s, is deeply shocking

After this, there are no more emails and the prose comes alight. When people gather at a family wedding, one mind gives way to another mind, histories unfold, similes happen – metaphors, even! The last run of the novel is all generosity; personal details simply emerge, real conversations are held, insights abound. The reader will meet all this with a whoop of recognition, though it is possible that some will wonder why it took so long.

How do you follow two brilliantly acclaimed novels? Rooney has solved the problem of success by writing about the problem of success. It is never clear how we are to relate to Alice, the writer, who feels separated from her origins by “a gulf of sophistication”. She can be chilly and intimidating, while her indifference to her finances can only be a provocation to the people who love her, and who haven’t got tuppence to their name. Alice hates “the system of literary production”, which tells writers they are special and removes them from ordinary life. As far as she is concerned, novels don’t matter a damn in the general scheme of things, and her reader (she only mentions one) is online and weird. I found myself wishing that Eileen would push back more strongly, but the friends’ shared world view makes it hard to get a proper dialectic going here. Meanwhile, “They never tire of giving me awards, do they?” Alice writes, and I, for one, start to think that Rooney is yanking our chain. When a fictional writer opines that writers’ opinions should not matter, the real writer is either having her cake and eating it, or enacting the paradoxes her character so derides.

The exposure of fame, especially sudden fame like Rooney’s, is deeply shocking. Like any trauma, it empties our lives of meaning, at least for a while. Afterwards, there is always the hope that a writer can return to the difficulty and pleasure of the work – that the world has not robbed them of the very thing we celebrate them for. It is wonderful to see such a return happen in front of you on the page. Alice’s conclusions are essentially religious. For the reader, caring for a fictional character is a way of practising the kind of “disinterested love to which Jesus calls us”. For the writer, a novel is a blessing that can not be refused. We must all be delighted that she, and her creator, have found a way through.

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Sally Rooney to Publish ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You’

The novel, which follows four young people in Ireland, is part of a two-book deal for the best-selling author of “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends.”

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A little over two years ago, the novelist Sally Rooney seemed poised to take a well-earned victory lap. At 27, she had published two best-selling and acclaimed novels, “Conversations With Friends” and “Normal People,” which was nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Critics anointed her as “a writer of rare confidence” and “the first great millennial novelist.”

Rooney wasn’t so sure about the hype — or her long-term prospects as a novelist. “I have no idea if I’ll write another book,” she told the Irish Independent in 2018. “Maybe I am one of those people who writes two novels in their 20s then never writes anything else again.”

Thankfully for her many devoted readers, Rooney gave it another try. In September, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will release her new novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” which follows four young characters in Ireland as they navigate the pressures of work and relationships against the backdrop of political turmoil and fears about their economic futures.

“The title itself speaks to some of the book’s themes, it’s an unanswered question,” Mitzi Angel, the publisher of FSG, said. “The characters are contemplating a world in which the future is very uncertain for them — what’s the world of work going to look like, what’s going to happen to the planet, what are the politics we are all living through. I think the stakes are higher.”

The new novel is likely to be one of this year’s most anticipated books. Rooney’s first two novels have sold more than a million copies in the United States alone.

Angel acquired U.S. rights to the new novel from the Wylie Agency as part of a two-book deal. FSG declined to provide details about the second book.

Rooney was previously published in the United States by Hogarth, a Penguin Random House imprint. In moving to FSG, a division of Macmillan, Rooney is reuniting with Angel, who, as the publisher of Faber & Faber from 2015 to 2018, published Rooney’s first two novels in Britain. Angel acquired Rooney’s books for Faber & Faber after prevailing in a seven-way auction.

“Sally and I have a history, and of course I’d secretly hoped that I might one day be able to publish her again,” Angel said.

Rooney became a literary sensation with the release of her 2017 debut novel, “Conversations With Friends,” which she wrote while studying for a master’s degree in American literature at Trinity College in Dublin.

Narrated by a Trinity student named Frances who is grappling with the realities of adulthood, the novel drew accolades from prominent writers like Zadie Smith, Curtis Sittenfeld and Celeste Ng.

Rooney followed with “Normal People,” a novel about the tortured friendship and romance between Marianne and Connell, who meet as teenagers from different socioeconomic backgrounds and whose social fortunes diverge further when they too end up at Trinity. The novel cemented Rooney’s reputation as a literary talent and was adapted into a television series. “She’s an original writer who, you sense, is just getting started,” Dwight Garner wrote in The New York Times.

“Beautiful World, Where Are You” also examines romantic relationships between young adults — but the characters are older, and the problems that occupy them are more global and entrenched. Set largely in Dublin and a nearby town, it centers on four characters — a novelist named Alice, her best friend Eileen, and their respective love interests, Felix and Simon. In conversations and email exchanges, the friends dissect their love lives and their fears about the future of the planet.

“Her books are always political, because they’re about how people need to figure out how to live together, how should we behave,” Angel said. “Those questions are present in the book, and she asks them without earnestness, but with a great deal of sincerity.”

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‘Beautiful World, Where Are You’ by Sally Rooney: Book Summary & Review

Sally Rooney’s new book “Beautiful World, Where Are You” has already become the biggest fiction title of 2021 in mere days and millennial book clubs are going gaga over it. Borrowing its title from Friedrich Schiller’s poem, Beautiful World, Where Are You is exactly the kind of book one would expect of her but more mature than her previous work and intense when detailing intimate relations.

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney is a fascinating and beautifully written story of life. It centers around four peopleвЂ”Alice, Felix, Eileen and SimonвЂ”living their mundane millennial lives in Ireland, with friendship and relationships intertwined. Set in the backdrop of Brexit/Trump Era, the novel is about connections between human beings and all the messiness of living and loving in the 21st century.

Like her previous books, it also doesn’t have quotation marks “…” around the spoken words which is irksome for many being not able to identify the speech while clever for others (depending on how you perceive).

‘Beautiful World, Where Are you’: Book at a GlanceВ

1. Who is Sally Rooney?

Sally Rooney, an Irish author and screenwriter, is often described as the best young novelist of her generation. She has an incredible talent for capturing raw emotion and her dialogue is always spot on. Her stories are special and she writes with honesty and emotion.

Sally Rooney has published two immensely successful books before she turned 28. Her recent release is Beautiful World, Where Are You, which is gaining immense popularity since its publication. The book is bold and smart; Rooney’s most mature work to-date. She knows how to write relationships. Her books capture something of intimacy that is often missed, a kind of sadness and vulnerability that just make you ache for her characters.

Sally Rooney has become a popular feminist icon and also been hailed as the first great millennial novelist for writing stories about love and late capitalism. However, there exist a division around her works among readers which makes her a bit controversial. After all, not everyone can be pleased.

Quote from the novel ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You’

2. вЂBeautiful World, Where Are YouвЂ™ by Sally Rooney: A Brief Book Summary (Spoiler-free)

The story of Beautiful World, Where Are You follows Alice and Eileen, two best friends from college who grew apart in recent years. Alice is a big time novelist who has made weaves with her first two books whereas Eileen is a low level editor at a literary magazine in Dublin. However, the couple remains in touch via email, updating each other about what’s going on in their lives professionally as well as romantically.В

Alice, after suffering a breakdown, leaves New York City and moves to the countryside of Ireland. Here she meets Felix, a man she hardly knows, and asks him to travel to Rome with her for some book events. On the other hand, Eileen has recently broken up with her long term boyfriend and then slipped back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since her teenage and had a crush on.

While still young, all the four protagonists are getting on with their lives and have struggled so far as to fit into the traditional box called life. In a never ending cycle of passion, love, desire, highs and lows, pain and insecurities, would these characters find people that will fill their cup and make their world brighter?

Sally RooneyвЂ™s Beautiful World, Where Are You is a book that possesses a beauty of its own.

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3. вЂBeautiful World, Where Are YouвЂ™ by Sally Rooney: Book Review

Sally RooneyвЂ™s Beautiful World, Where Are You doesnвЂ™t have a strong plot. It revolves around conversations with four best friends about their personal lives trying find their way to fulfillment in life by engaging in dating relationships and pursuing conversations about politics (all the while not actually doing anything practical). The opening of the book is quite entertaining and brimmed with sharp, witty humor which soon progresses in to devouring email conversations. While reading it, I found myself drawn to RooneyвЂ™s characters, constantly judging themвЂ”sometimes finding them flawed while at others unable to understand their motivations.В

She has painted in a very peculiar style the emotional and intellectual lives of ordinary people with such care and sincerity. She has portrayed a complete emotional mess in a really brilliant way. Moreover, Rooney has masterfully stripped dialogues and language down to its bare form, thus conveying the biggest ideas with the barest prose.В

The perspective of the story frequently switches from email correspondence between Alice and Eileen, to third person perspective of the four protagonists. However, in these non-email chapters of the book we donвЂ™t learn something new. Through the charactersвЂ™ observations about the present time, the author has brilliantly articulated certain issues of politics, philosophy, religion, civilization, and climate change etc. Furthermore, the characters are portrayed with such realness and familiarity that it is absolutely impossible for the reader to let go of them easily.

3.1. Ending of Sally RooneyвЂ™s вЂBeautiful World, Where Are YouвЂ™В В

The ending of вЂBeautiful World, Where Are You вЂ™ hit me really hard. But in all the right places! People may have mixed opinions on the ending of the book, but I really did enjoy it. ItвЂ™s utterly perfect! The book ends on such an inspiring and beautiful note. Rooney has given her book a neat вЂhappy endingвЂ™, or maybe a version of one. Although I wasnвЂ™t expecting it, the author did it anyway. And I honestly spent a considerable amount of time weeping at the end (catharsis, you know itвЂ™s a good thing! Isn вЂ™t it? ).В

The ending of вЂBeautiful World, Where Are You вЂ™ is another thing which has made me a huge fan of Sally Rooney. The first being her art of storytelling and peculiar style of writing.В

3.2. Why Should You Read Sally RooneyвЂ™s вЂBeautiful World, Where Are YouвЂ™?

Sally RooneyвЂ™s Beautiful World, Where Are You is an outstanding literary achievement. ItвЂ™s a story about navigating careers, friendships and relationships, with characters that are realistically flawed, struggling to honestly convey their thoughts and emotions. The emails between friends, Alice and Eileen, are intimate in that they not only speak about their lives, but share their thoughts on the world, from climate change to beauty, religion, and having children.В

Sally Rooney is a well consumed and beloved author. Her style is amazing, mature and contemplative. Besides, her characters are real and familiar, and her story is lucid and moving too. Rooney has raised big existential questions and expressed various thoughts and themes, all very timely and current. And there is also a connection to Pandemic. Overall, this book will make you feel flabbergasted. ItвЂ™s definitely worth reading!

If youвЂ™re not a fan of RooneyвЂ™s work, you can still read this book. If youвЂ™ve never read any of Sally Rooney’s books, you can still enjoy it. And, if you love RooneyвЂ™s signature style, then this one’s definitely for you. In fact, itвЂ™s a must read of the year!

3.3. What I liked Most About вЂBeautiful World, Where Are YouвЂ™ by Sally Rooney?

I really liked the story of Sally RooneyвЂ™s Beautiful World, Where Are You. It was quite engrossing that I could easily read more than 50 pages of the book in one sitting. And from 50 pages onward, the book fully grabbed my attention and I was completely invested, with my love for the characters (excluding Felix) growing with every chapter.В

RooneyвЂ™s writing style is truly unique. She has packed several thoughts and themes into the pages of her book. For instance, friendship, love, capitalism, religion, children, climate change/over-consumption, and the idealism of celebrities. I really enjoyed many of them, but particularly loved the depiction of the friendship between Alice and Eileen. Moreover, the author possesses the most remarkable ability to create protagonists that act as a reflection to us. Her beautiful story gives new meaning to the phrase вЂcharacter-drivenвЂ™.В Beautiful World, Where Are You focuses on fleshed-out characters rather than a detailed, well-built plot. In fact, the book has a character-driven plot. That is, the story is driven by emotion as opposed to a high concept plot.В

3.4. What I Disliked Most About вЂBeautiful World, Where Are YouвЂ™?

The only thing I disliked about Sally RooneyвЂ™s Beautiful World, Where Are You was that the letters of the main characters felt too long to me. It was basically due to the fact that I was too infused in the character development that some of the protagonists’ analyses of present time went over my head. IвЂ™ll definitely re-read this book with more attention, and fill the pages with my scribbles so as to avoid missing anything again.

I also disliked the character of Felix and IвЂ™m not going to tell you why. YouвЂ™ve to find it by yourself. Let me be clear that there isnвЂ™t any fault in his character development.

3.5. вЂBeautiful World, Where Are YouвЂ™: CharactersвЂ™ Analysis

Beautiful World, Where Are You portrays four major characters: Alice, Eileen, Felix, and Simon.В LetвЂ™s quickly overview them!

What I liked Most About Characters in Sally Rooney’s вЂBeautiful World, Where Are YouвЂ™?

Rooney has an original voice and knows how to perfectly capture our contemporary experiences. She has depicted messy and imperfect characters, which I resonate with as IвЂ™m also a messy and imperfect person. Also, while reading the book, I couldn’t help but think if Alice was a cypher for Sally Rooney throughout the story. ItвЂ™s quite hard to ignore the similarities between the two.В

In a nutshell, I loved the story of Beautiful World, Where Are You. I loved its characters, its ending and the connection to the current pandemic. In fact, I loved the whole experience. I highly recommend this book, and I hope if you read it, it will spark the same types of feelings for you.В

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When multiple friends I know in real life start talking to me about a certain author I realise that this is someone who has broken through to the mainstream. My friends are very intelligent and literate, but they don’t generally follow the latest publications with as much geeky rigour as I do along with other readers wrapped up in the online bookish community. Yet, over the past few years multiple people IRL have asked me for recommendations of a book that is exactly like “Normal People”. Few authors have experienced such a meteoric rise to fame as Sally Rooney. Since the publication of her first two novels and the TV adaptation of her second novel, her books have been alternately hailed as representing the voice of a generation and pigeonholed as overhyped naval-gazing millennial fiction. Personally, I feel a bit bemused by any such strident claims as her books strike me as simply well-written, engaging, funny and smart fiction which is well-aligned with our present times. But Rooney’s popularity feels more like a chance occurrence which could have happened to any of her contemporaries such as Belinda McKeon, Jade Sharma or Naoise Dolan. Nevertheless, the simmering anticipation for Rooney’s new novel “Beautiful World Where Are You” has made it one of the publishing events of the year. I can assure you it’s an extremely enjoyable novel and Rooney enthusiasts won’t be disappointed.

When commenting on this new novel most Sally Rooney fans and critics will probably remark on how one of its central characters, Alice, superficially resembles the author. She’s published two extremely successful novels and feels ambivalent about the newfound fame she’s achieved as an author. And Alice isn’t shy about her opinions concerning readers’ prying interest in the author’s personal life, the vanity of fellow writers and the precarious position books have as a commodity in our current culture. She’s also prone to complaining about her privileged position: “They never tire of giving me awards, do they? It’s a shame I’ve tired so quickly of receiving them, or my life would be endless fun.” But she also vividly describes the deleterious effect such fame has upon her: “I feel like I’ve been locked in a smoke-filled room with thousands of people shouting at me incomprehensibly day and night for the last several years.” We’re made aware of how Alice previously suffered a breakdown from stress. Alice’s celebrity doesn’t change the initial awkwardness of going on a date with someone she meets on a dating app. In fact, it makes it worse when her date, Felix, discovers that she’s well known and this squeamish situation is realistically described. Though it’s easy to draw parallels between this character and the author and assume Rooney is using this opportunity to vent her own frustrations, it’s important to emphasize how the novel contains a carefully calibrated balance of points of view.

Another primary character is Eileen, Alice’s best friend since university. Much of this novel’s text is composed of messages between these women who now live in separate places since Alice moved to a more rural town in Ireland and Eileen remained in Dublin. They ruminate on a wide range of subjects including religion, history, capitalism, gender, art and concepts of beauty. It’s fitting that Rooney’s first novel was titled “Conversations with Friends” because this is what all three of her novels concern. It’s interesting giving this novel the Bechdel test because Alice and Eileen’s messages also include lengthly ruminations about love and their respective love interests. However, it seems only natural that they discuss men at length as I do the same with friends whom I exchange lengthy emails. While Alice begins a tentative relationship with Felix, Eileen experiences a hot and cold relationship with Simon, someone she’s known since childhood. Like with “Normal People”, this new novel contains a traditional romantic storyline where the reader is left wondering: will they or won’t they get together? And I was drawn into the suspense of this plot as I grew to care and form opinions about the characters as if they were friends of my own.

While readers will quickly identify Rooney’s closeness to Alice, I think it’s equally easy to see the fidelity she feels towards Eileen. Eileen works as a poorly-paid editor of a small literary review and struggles to pay the expensive rent of her Dublin flat-share. At the launch party and reading for an issue, we see what a meagre life she has selling only two copies of the publication and spending most of her time directing people to the toilets. It’s easy to imagine that if Rooney hadn’t achieved the fame that she has this could easily have been her life. I also felt a strong affinity towards Eileen who struggles to embrace opportunities which come her way. The narrative takes care to fill out Eileen’s backstory more than any other character in the book. We also come to intimately understand the positions of bisexual Felix who works in a gruelling warehouse job and Simon who is a devout Catholic that has a burgeoning career in politics. Each of these characters’ positions are dramatically played out in their interactions with each other to show the strengths and weaknesses of each. Rooney thoughtfully tests their points of view when faced with real world challenges and the way in which other people react to them.

At points it feels as if the characters are like Sims figures from that video game where we read how they go throughout their days perfunctorily fulfilling certain duties and actions. I feel like this style of narrative reflects a kind modern self consciousness which has arisen due to social media and the sense that we’re living out a simulated existence. A character might get lost for hours on their phone or regularly check dating apps without any intention of arranging actual dates. It’s a way in which Rooney so skilfully portrays the feeling of a certain generation within a certain demographic. All her characters are struggling with the way in which to be an adult and feel (as most generations do) that their generation might be the last. Eileen writes to Alice: “I know we agree that civilisation is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life.” One of the biggest questions in the book is how will these characters find the motivation to continue and have fulfilling lives when the prospect of a future filled with environmental and societal collapse looms before them. As well as giving a nuanced depiction of friendship and romance, this novel also meaningfully addresses this issue and provides a surprisingly hopeful message. Rooney certainly isn’t the only author people should be reading, but her writing is excellent and this new novel is extremely intelligent, moving and I’m sure many readers will strongly connect with it.

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22 книги, которые нужно прочитать в 2022 году

Новый роман от автора бестселлера «Нормальные люди», биография «великой и ужасной» Анны Винтур, сборник трогательных рассказов-воспоминаний о школьных годах от фонда Хабенского и продолжение нашумевшего детектива «Клуб убийств по четвергам» — список отличных книг, которые обязательно нужно прочитать в этом году.

По просьбе Marie Claire крупнейший книжный сервис в России и странах СНГ ЛитРес выбрал 22 лучшие книжные новинки, на которые стоит обратить внимание.

«Beautiful World, Where Are You», Sally Rooney

Салли Руни, автор бестселлеров «Нормальные люди» и «Разговоры с друзьями», создает жизненные и искренние истории, в которых большинство современных людей могут легко узнать себя и свои отношения. В следующем году в свет выйдет еще один роман, так точно описывающий проблемы и переживания тридцатилетних. В центре сюжета — писательница Алиса, у которой намечается роман с Феликсом, работающим на складе. А еще у девушки есть подруга, переживающая тяжелый разрыв и бросившаяся в сомнительные отношения с Саймоном. Все четверо занимаются сексом, переживают из-за секса, тревожатся и испытывают чувство вины. Как обычно, все сложно. Или просто, но люди склонны усложнять?

«В сторону рая», Ханья Янагихары

В январе 2022 года в Великобритании выходит долгожданный роман Ханьи Янагихары «В сторону рая», а на русском языке книга должна появиться к концу года в издательстве Corpus. Ханья Янагихара снова будет играть с временем, пространством и сюжетными линиями. Она рассказывает три истории, которые, на первый взгляд, никак между собой не связаны, но в итоге сплетаются в единое целое. Первая — разворачивается в вымышленной Америке 19 века, вторая — в реальном Нью-Йорке 80-х годов, а третья — в будущем, в котором человечество страдает от многочисленных эпидемий. Писательница говорит о проблемах современного общества и создает устрашающую картину мира, которая может ожидать человечество в скором времени.

«Анна. Биография», Эми Оделл

Наконец-то в свет выходит биография «великой и ужасной» Анны Винтур. И это будет намного более правдивая история, чем фильм «Дьявол носит Prada», благодаря которому о влиятельном редакторе Vogue узнали даже те, кто далеко от мира моды. Автор биографии — известная фэшн-журналистка Эми Оделл, проходившая у Анны собеседование и много лет работавшая редактором моды американского Cosmopolitan. Эми работала над этой книгой около трех лет, общалась с друзьями и коллегами Винтур, провела исследование и попыталась показать характер героини всесторонне, не выставляя Анну монстром.

«Человек, который умер дважды», Ричард Томас Осман

Автор ироничного детектива «Клуб убийств по четвергам», рассказывающий о сыщиках-любителях из дома престарелых, написал продолжение нашумевшего романа. Если он вам понравился, то и эта книга зайдет! Не успели пожилые помощники полиции раскрыть одно преступление, как в городке произошло еще убийство. В то же время приятель одной из участниц «Клуба убийств по четвергам» нуждается в защите — он пустился в бега, так как его обвиняют в похищении бриллиантов. Неужели два дела как-то связаны между собой? Участникам клуба предстоит в этом разобраться. Как всегда, с шутками, курьезами и даже романтическими интрижками. После 60 жизнь только начинается!

«Перекрестки: роман. Ключ ко всем мифологиям, том 1», Джонатан Франзен

Еще одно литературное событие, которого мир ждал уже несколько лет: Джонатан Франзен, получивший мировую известность благодаря романам «Поправки» и «Свобода», анонсировал выход новой книги. Американское издательство Farrar, Straus and Giroux сообщает, что это сага об одной семье, члены которой формируются как личности под воздействием общественно-политических и интеллектуальных влияний и трендов. Очевидно, это попытка передать дух эпохи и отличительные черты нескольких поколений. Роман станет первой частью трилогии, так что нас ждет нечто значительное.

«Необыкновенное обыкновенное чудо. Школьные истории»

«Необыкновенное обыкновенное чудо. Школьные истории» — это сборник трогательных рассказов-воспоминаний о школьных годах, составленный Благотворительным Фондом Константина Хабенского. В нем истории от подопечных фонда, воспоминания современных писателей, актеров, режиссеров. Список авторов впечатляет: Людмила Улицкая, Рената Литвинова, Наринэ Абгарян, Денис Драгунский, Сергей Гармаш и другие знакомые вам имена. Все рассказаны разноплановые, но объединены единой темой. Не сомневаемся, что книга будет пользоваться успехом и станет хорошим подарком.

«Will. Чему может научить нас простой парень, ставший самым высокооплачиваемым актером Голливуда», Уилл Смит, Марк Мэнсон

Уилл Смит основательно подошел к написанию своей биографии и создал книгу в соавторстве с Марком Мэнсоном, автором бестселлера «Тонкое искусство пофигизма». В предисловии к изданию, актер заявил, что с самого детства считал себя трусом и слабаком. Видимо, именно эти комплексы помогли Смиту стать звездой мирового масштаба. Биография обещает быть откровенной: Уилл рассказал и про сложные отношения с родителями, и подробности личной жизни, и первые шаги в актерской карьере. Не сомневаемся, что получилось вдохновляюще — как все у Уилла Смита.

«Обманутые опытом. Почему широкий кругозор стал важнее глубокой специализации в одной профессии», Дэвид Эпштейн

Исследователь и журналист Дэвид Эпштейн в своей новой книге разбирает главный тренд 21 века, который не все еще успели осознать. Он говорит о том, как изменились современные требования к профессионалам, и как важно постоянно развиваться в разных сферах вместо того, чтобы всю жизнь делать одно и то же. Автор утверждает, что узкие специалисты останутся в прошлом — в наше время важно непрерывно расширять свой кругозор. Именно эта гибкость ума и готовность впитывать новое будет все больше цениться в ближайшие годы. Заодно он рассказывает, как это сделать и чему начать учиться прямо сейчас.

«Зима не будет вечной. Искусство восстановления после ударов судьбы», Кэтрин Мэй

Книга, особенно актуальная в ковидную эпоху, уже получила хвалебные отзывы американской прессы и даже писательницы Элизабет Гилберт. В ней автор рассказывает, как переживала черную полосу в жизни, какие мысли и практики помогли ей справиться с отчаянием и как найти источник света даже в самой непроглядной мгле. Главный посыл — жизнь разнообразна. И, увы, в ней непременно будут очень грустные и болезненные моменты, которые обязательно закончатся. Полезное поддерживающее чтение для тех, кто устал, впал в депрессию или проходит через самые сложные испытания.

«Billie Eilish», Билли Айлиш

Написать автобиографию в 19 лет? О да, бывает и такое. Главная звезда поколения Z, талантливая певица и триумфатор «Грэмми» Билли Айлиш решила рассказать поклонникам о своем детстве и становлении. Несмотря на скромный возраст, Айлиш есть, чем поделиться: пение в хоре и первые шаги в музыке (свою первую песню девочка написала в 12 лет), внезапно-свалившаяся мировая известность и связанная с ней эмоциональная нагрузка, многотысячные площадки и отношения с родителями, всегда поощрявшими все увлечения дочери. Последние, к слову, сыграли важнейшую роль в ее становлении, не оказывая при этом давления. Любопытная книга, которая поможет лучше понять один из главных феноменов музыкальной индустрии.

«Girl with Bright Futures», Tracy Dobmeier, Wendy Katzman

В США этот роман уже стал бестселлером, а на русском языке появится в продаже уже в следующем году. В центре сюжета — три амбициозных матери, которые мечтают о том, чтобы их дочери поступили в самые престижные университеты. Алисия, глава крупной компании, готова вложить любые средства в образование дочери. Ее личный помощник Маррен не обладает такими деньгами и связями, однако точно знает, что у ее девочки — блестящие способности. В то же время Келли лишает ребенка нормальной жизни подростка, заставляя ее учиться и заниматься школьным волонтерством. Женщины, сами того не замечая, пытаются самореализоваться за счет детей, попутно калеча им психику и физическое здоровье. Разумеется, все это приведет к трагедии, последствия которой придется расхлебывать еще долго.

«Моя жизнь с братьями Уолтер», Али Новак

Жизнь главной героини по имени Джеки Ховард изменилась в одночасье после гибели родителей. После этой трагедии она вынуждена переехать из респектабельного Нью-Йорка в провинциальное Колорадо к своим новым опекунам — семье Уолтеров с одиннадцатью сыновьями-непоседами, которые не имеют представления о личных границах. Чопорной девушке предстоит выполнить непростую задачу — выстроить отношения со своими новыми близкими и, одновременно, сохранить преданность своим родителям, выполнив данное им обещание бороться с жизненным хаосом.

«Волнистая карьера», Сара Эллис и Хелен Таппер

Наше время отличается непредсказуемостью и нестабильностью. В этих новых условиях карьера развивается не так, как прежде. Она становится «волнистой», при такой траектории происходит медленное перемещение между профессиональными ролями, отраслями, рабочей локацией… Авторы этой книги убеждены, что эти перемены могут вызывать стресс и даже подавлять. Как извлечь максимум возможностей и пользы из этой новой свободы? Как достигать своих профессиональных целей, сохранять мотивацию и видеть перспективы? Об этом и пойдет речь в этой книге об успехе.

«Пока мне не исполнилось 30. Что важно понять и сделать уже сейчас», Эллина Дейл

Писательница и блогер рассказывает о способах выхода из кризиса первой четверти жизни. Общество, социальные сети, стереотипные суждения о том, как «надо правильно», ежедневно воздействуют на выбор, самооценку и психику. Из-за этого многие 20-летние боятся не оправдать ожиданий, не преуспеть, не найти престижную работу и остаться за бортом жизни. Чтобы не попасть в ловушку, важно научиться понимать и принимать себя, уважать свои интересы, принять тот факт, что ошибки — важны и неизбежны. Как научиться всему этому, не отвлекаясь на потоки информации? Обо всем этом и пойдет речь в книге.

«Подлинная история Анны Карениной», Павел Басинский

«Эта книга писалась сама собой», — признается Павел Басинский в предисловии. Литературный критик, знаток жизни и творчества Льва Толстого, на этот раз он выступает в роли не столько писателя, сколько преданного читателя одного из главных романов русской литературы. Перечитывая «Анну Каренину», он находит в ней новые детали и тонкости — мелочи, которые заставляют взглянуть иначе на все произведение. Эта книга — попытка остановиться на «единственной» версии романа. При этом Басинский отдает себе отчет в том, что «никакой подлинной истории Анны Карениной не существует, Анн Карениных столько же, сколько читателей этого романа». Книга поможет всем фанатикам, подсевшим на этот роман, разобраться в своих личных Аннах.

«Саша, привет!», Дмитрий Данилов

Один из самых успешных современных писателей, поэтов и драматургов написал роман, в котором предложил читателю постепенно погружаться в сложную экзистенциальную ситуацию героя при помощи… метода кино. Читателю придется стать соглядатаем. «На человека наставлена камера, и мы за ним наблюдаем» — так автор описывает главный прием, позволяющий смотреть за персонажем фантасмагории, философской притчи о человеке, который вынужден выяснять различия между собой живым и собой мертвым.

«Чагин», Евгений Водолазкин

О своем новом романе писатель рассказывает мало. Мол, «преимущественно это роман о Чагине». Фамилию главного героя Водолазкин назвал «платоновской» за простоту и лаконичность звучания. От автора романа «Лавр», принесшем Водолазкину известность, не стоит ждать самоповтора. На этот раз временем действия «Чагина» будут 60–70-е годы прошлого века — время советских свободы и «застоя». Посмотрим, как загадочный Чагин справится с этим непростым временем.

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Beautiful World, Where Are You review: Sally Rooney’s novel asks big questions — and doesn’t always have the answers

Rooney, of course, is the celebrated writer of Normal People and Conversations With Friends, both published before her 30th birthday. Alone, each book was a phenomenon; combined with last year’s obsessively watched TV adaptation of Normal (and the coming limited series for Conversations, due to premiere next year), she became something exceedingly rare in an age of itchy digital distraction: a literary novelist who’s also a household name.

Beautiful is the first of her works to be at least in part about that — «that» being money and fame and what it feels like to live inside the blast radius of your own sudden, life-obliterating success. And if those disclosures offer sometimes startling insight into its author’s deeply rattled state of mind, they do not, alas, always serve her story. Rooney’s proxy here is a woman named Alice, a fair-haired Dubliner driven to take up residence in the remote Irish countryside after her own precocious lit-world triumph leads to a psychiatric breakdown. Hardly anyone knows how to even find her on a map aside from her two closest friends: Eileen, an overeducated and underpaid magazine editor, and Simon, an earnestly handsome political activist five years older than them both. Eileen and Simon have long had a thing, though they seem loathe to acknowledge it to each other, or to themselves; Alice is single until she begins seeing Felix — a taciturn local who’s shruggingly indifferent to his job in an Amazon-like warehouse, and shows even less interest in the fact that his new would-be girlfriend has her own Wikipedia page. (Though he’s still willing to tag along as her plus-one on a work trip to Rome, generously sponsored by her publishers.)

The romantic roundelays and betrayals that ricochet between the foursome form the backbone of the book’s scattered plot, such as it is. But much of the story lives in the letters that Alice and Eileen exchange over time — chatty, intimate epistles on faith and politics and sexual identity, the broken institution of marriage and the smoldering trash heap that is social media. There is much despairing discussion of celebrity as a «disfiguring social disease» and beauty as a thing that died in 1976, along with the birth of modern plastics. But Alice’s harshest critiques are reserved for herself — or rather, the fun-house mirror of public perception she sees her warped reflection in: «I keep encountering this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my energy. I hate her ways of expressing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything. And yet when other people read about her, they believe that she is me. Confronting this fact makes me feel I am already dead.»

Alice and the rest of Beautiful‘s restless youth are exactly the kind of fervent, clever truth seekers that Rooney has made her signature; at its best, the clarity of their presence slices across the page like a hot knife through butter. But the book’s millennial cri de coeur can also tip into navel-gazing indulgence, heavy with the undergrad fugue of late night dorm-room debates and clove-cigarette smoke. Their World isn’t really new, after all; it’s just new to them, spinning at the center as fast as they can. B

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Shock of the Old

Sally Rooney’s fiction for end times.

By Tony Tulathimutte

October 4, 2021

Illustration by Hanna Barczyk.

Art isn’t meant to be one-size-fits-all, and a book’s popularity is always less about its worthiness than its marketing budget. We all know this. But the problem—particularly for Sally Rooney, whose two novels and two TV deals have sent critics scrambling to theorize her success—is that hype is easily mistaken for claims to preeminence or universality. Which leads people to blame the hyped novelist, rather than the hype itself, for not living up to their highly personal tastes or expectations. 1

Books in Review

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Like all popular books, Rooney’s novels have been critiqued through the lens of their author’s various public identities. She has been called both “representatively millennial” and “not really engaging with any of the social issues that might make her truly relevant to the millennial moment.” Her works are “an essentially confessional account of female consciousness,” but she is also “hardly that feminist writer we can rally around.” She’s been lauded for understanding “a kind of enduring, hard-bitten Irishness,” a nationality that supposedly “insulates her from the social and cultural conversation going on in [America],” even though Rooney, who has a master’s degree in American literature and an Internet connection, says she doesn’t “really have a sense of Irishness, or what that means.” The Guardian suggests that the Marxism of Rooney’s characters is there to signal their elite background. The Atlantic calls the novel’s politics “ambient rather than explicit,” while Slate considers them not only explicit but satirical. (Rooney herself has said, “I don’t know what it means to write a Marxist novel.”) 2

Worst of all, Rooney has suffered the misfortune of being dubbed “the First Great Millennial Author” in The New York Times, a title that’s not only impossible to live up to but invites invidious scrutiny, making the author accountable for the bluster of critics and publicists. It’s fine to argue about how Marxist, feminist, Irish, millennial, or “great” a book is, but when most of the writing about it consists of squabbling over how much and what sort of relevant subject matter it contains, we are doing hype criticism, not book criticism. 3

With all of this in mind, Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, feels at times like an attempt to reassert the author’s authority. The basic setup will be familiar to readers of Normal People and Conversations With Friends: Set in the summer of 2019 and onward, the book follows two twentysomething literary Irish women, Alice and Eileen, who share an intimate but unequal friendship, date unreliable men, and deliver mini-lectures in the understated tones of millennial miserabilism. Though the women are physically separated for most of the novel, their stories run parallel: Alice convalesces from a nervous breakdown after the succès fou of her two novels; Eileen, an editorial assistant at a literary magazine, is on the rebound from a breakup. On Tinder, Alice meets the roguish Felix, a warehouse worker who likes to neg her, and Eileen pursues her childhood crush, Simon, an earnestly Catholic left-wing policy adviser with a girlfriend. The chapters alternate between Alice and Eileen’s letters to each other and their dealings with men, and they provide the same mix of hot-and-cold romance and intellectual shadowboxing as do Rooney’s first two novels. 4

But what’s new in Beautiful World, Where Are You is a heightened self-awareness, conveyed mainly through Alice and Eileen’s correspondence. Having thoroughly metabolized the likely reception of a Sally Rooney novel, Beautiful World seems eager to sucker-punch its critics by clarifying its own viewpoints beyond all doubt. Through her characters, Rooney strides into the arena in full debate-champ regalia, penning mini-essays about identity politics, extractive capitalism, Catholicism, climate change, theories of sexuality, Manet’s portraits of Berthe Morisot, and Late Bronze Age collapse. 5

Fall Books

Anthony Veasna So’s Portraits of Diaspora

Was Jimmy Carter an Outlier?

Grace Cho’s Memoir of Food and Empire

Do We Need to Work?

Eric Williams and the Tangled History of Capitalism and Slavery

Sally Rooney’s Fiction for End Times

The Expansive Feminism of Jacqueline Rose

Both protagonists also deliver bleak takes on the contemporary novel and publishing world. The depressive Alice maligns her own popular books, considering them “morally and politically worthless,” even though writing is “the only thing I want to do.” The equally depressive Eileen, who feels overshadowed by Alice’s success, argues that “the contemporary novel is (with very few exceptions) irrelevant.” Nonetheless, Alice tells Eileen—and anyone else who might happen to be listening—that readers who project authors onto their books or characters are “quite literally insane”: “what do the books gain by being attached to me, my face, my mannerisms, in all their demoralising specificity? Nothing.” 6

Rooney’s strategy of autofiction-baiting is counterintuitive—pulling aside the curtain only to insist we pay no attention to the author behind it. But the point is well taken. It’s wrong to base criticism on fragments of an author’s public persona; books should be judged by the terms they set for themselves. 7

Current Issue

S o what are the terms of Beautiful World, Where Are You? Rooney has called her first novel “conventional in its structure, even though its prose style and the themes it explores and the politics that underpin it, maybe, are on the experimental side.” But this book’s themes and politics turn out to be surprisingly trad-cath, as its characters indulge in a nostalgia that is sheepish but heartfelt. The title, borrowed from a 1788 Friedrich Schiller poem, gestures at the underlying theme of beauty’s scarcity in the modern world, and the book’s implicit answer to this question is: in the bygone past. 8

“My theory is that human beings lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, when plastics became the most widespread material in existence,” Eileen laments, while Alice believes the beauty instinct died out “when the Berlin Wall came down.” They long for the reassuring stability of some halcyon age before capitalism. As Eileen writes: 9

It is hard in these circumstances not to feel that modern living compares poorly with the old ways of life, which have come to represent something more substantial, more connected to the essence of the human condition. This nostalgic impulse is of course extremely powerful, and has recently been harnessed to great effect by reactionary and fascist political movements, but I’m not convinced that this means the impulse itself is intrinsically fascistic. I think it makes sense that people are looking back wistfully to a time before the natural world started dying, before our shared cultural forms degraded into mass marketing and before our cities and towns became anonymous employment hubs. 10

Even with the caveat that “we have good reason to be skeptical of aesthetic nostalgia,” the protagonists’ desire to embrace tradition is tempered only slightly by the awareness that this position is at odds with their politics. But their avowed atheism doesn’t stop them from making doe eyes at God hypothetically: “If I believed in God,” Eileen writes, “I wouldn’t want to prostrate myself before him and ask for forgiveness. I would just want to thank him every day, for everything.” And Alice: “When it comes to putting something at the center of life, God strikes me as a good option—better at least than making up stories about people who don’t exist.” 11

Just as it flirts with nostalgia, Beautiful World also reserves ductfuls of bile for what it considers to be signs of present-day degeneracy. The two protagonists agree that “civilization is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life”—and that’s not just the plastics. Eileen denounces the beauty industry as “responsible for some of the worst ugliness we see around us in our visual environment, and the worst, most false aesthetic ideal, which is the ideal of consumerism,” and she considers vulgar the desire to look attractive: “to confuse these basically auto-erotic or status-driven impulses with real aesthetic experience seems to me an extremely serious mistake for anyone who cares about culture.” Never mind Eileen’s casual banishment of fashion, drag, and makeup from the realm of culture; more revealing is her presumption of a stable consensus around what constitutes “real” aesthetic experience. 12

Eileen also expresses broad skepticism concerning various forms of progress: 13

What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people? 14

Meanwhile Alice, a “widely despised celebrity novelist” by her own reckoning, wonders “whether celebrity culture has sort of metastasized to fill the emptiness left by religion. A sort of malignant growth where the sacred used to be.” 15

Even values that the two women themselves hold are rendered suspect by any hint of novelty. Lest her Marxism be mistaken for post-Occupy millennial bandwagoning, Eileen insists at a party, “When I first started going around talking about Marxism, people laughed at me. Now it’s everyone’s thing. And to all these new people trying to make communism cool, I would just like to say, welcome aboard, comrades. No hard feelings.” At the same time, she sees the viability of acting on her politics as yet another beautiful thing of the past: “If serious political action is still possible, which I think at this point is an open question, maybe it won’t involve people like us—in fact I think it almost certainly won’t.” 16

So rather than represent a generational vanguard, this book is straightforwardly rearguard, not just in structure but in worldview: averse to pop, bibliophilic, Old Left, and proudly dowdy, placing at its emotional center the virtues of family, monogamy, and just a tiny bit of God. Any critic keen to describe Rooney’s appeal as a function of her youth is in for a shock of the old. 17

T his dwelling on the past comes in spite of the fact that—spoilers incoming—the book’s ending gets as close to the present as a novel can get. Its final section, set during the Covid-19 lockdown, finds the protagonists contentedly partnered and well-off. Alice, still a dour millionaire, has downgraded her atheism to agnosticism and is working on her next novel, despite her earlier doubts about the worth of writing. Eileen is happily pregnant and “financially secure,” with “a supportive partner who loves me”; her main concern now is weighing the merits of “buying a house and having children with a boy I grew up with.” 18

The pandemic might have been the ideal occasion for Rooney to show how her characters’ abstract ideals are tested when history comes knocking, but it turns out to be only a worrisome augur of things to come, not something that affects them severely. “The difference between lockdown and normal life is (depressingly?) minimal,” Alice writes, before a page-long rant about her fame and publicity. You could say that the choice to underscore their happy insularity is the point, given that Rooney has elsewhere addressed her frustrations with how “so often the female protagonist who subverts the confines of the nineteenth-century bourgeois novel just dies at the end because she’s too dangerous.” Beautiful World obviates this problem by not subverting its confines at all, being complacent in literal confinement. 19

Intentional or not, I think it’s a missed opportunity. Rather than grapple with the tension between their reactionary aesthetics and revolutionary politics, the characters cop out, drop out, and opt to cultivate their own gardens, literally: Felix gets into gardening. It’s not that seeing these privileged characters weather Covid peacefully is implausible or unsatisfying, though it does feel somewhat unearned, given that the book’s plot consists of a few minor rough patches in their various relationships. The real issue is that it’s framed, chillingly, as a happy ending. (We know this because at the end Eileen writes, “I’m very happy,” while Alice feels “wonderfully and almost frighteningly lucky.”) “The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel,” Alice contends earlier in the book, “is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth.” Yet Beautiful World doesn’t resist or challenge this notion but rather capitulates to it, offering the comforts of a more beautiful age that it knows never existed. 20

B ut hold on. Have I committed the same old mistake, by assuming the book ever intended to supply answers or feature likable, unprivileged, morally exemplary characters? About Normal People, Rooney has said, “It’s not like it’s my guidebook on how to be a Marxist. It is a novel. It’s not really didactic in any way.” Maybe no novel is obligated to resolve any of the moral dilemmas it poses, much less justify wholesale the writing of literature during a time of crisis. (I mean, look at me—I’m writing a book review.) Of a piece with Beautiful World’s traditionalism is its defense of art for art’s sake, its insistence that beauty is what redeems art’s uselessness. So instead of asking whether the characters believe the right things or live the right way, let’s consider the quality of the writing. 21

Earlier reviews offered acclaim for Rooney’s style, calling it “self-evidently spellbinding and new”; they identified “something on the craft level, the line level, that turns these boilerplate romantic stories into compelling works of art.” Most praised her style’s simplicity and precision (“concise,” “lucid and exacting,” “even-toned,” “muted”) or the way it embodied a tech-savvy zeitgeist. Rooney “captures meticulously the way a generation raised on social data thinks and talks,” wrote one reviewer, while others detected a “ring of native digital literacy,” with paragraphs “built for the Instagram age.” 22

I also used to think Rooney’s prose was clean and errorless; it turns out I didn’t read closely enough. When you slow down to study the sentences, the first thing you’ll notice everywhere are intensifiers and down-toners: those kludgy modifiers used to compensate for inexact word choice. Not that bean-counting alone is any way to evaluate literature, but just to convey the extent of the problem here, the words “very” and “really” appear a combined 238 times over 353 pages, while “kind of,” “a little,” “a bit,” and “almost” show up a combined 292 times. Sometimes they appear twice in the same sentence (“I dread to imagine what kind of faces I was making, in my efforts to seem like the kind of person who regularly interacts with others”), or in consecutive sentences: 23

You left kind of abruptly, he said. I was looking for you. 24

You couldn’t have been looking for very long, she said. It’s an extremely small house. 25

He gave a kind of puzzled smile. No, well, you hadn’t been gone for very long, he said. 26

Note how “kind of” appears in both the dialogue and the distant narration; the same habits crop up in Alice and Eileen’s letters, which means that the tic belongs to the author as much as any particular character. 27

Then there’s the abuse of stock gestures, those little tells meant to indicate how a character is feeling. Everyone is constantly described as looking at or looking away from each other, pausing or saying nothing, usually for a moment or a few seconds. Laughs and smiles appear 253 times, accompanied by generic adjectives like “wry,” “shy,” “sheepish,” “conspiratorial.” Of the 63 instances in which we are told someone nods, 27 of them helpfully specify that the character nodded her head. Entire passages are stitched together from these gestures: “She lowered her gaze then. Maybe that’s because you don’t know me very well, she said. He gave an offhanded laugh. She said nothing. He went on watching her back for a few seconds longer.” 28

Many of these lapses are side effects of the distant narration. Unlike Rooney’s two earlier novels, the narrator in Beautiful World has no direct access to the characters’ thoughts and perceptions. This opacity is fine for writers with the theatrical talent of conveying their characters’ moods through dialogue and action alone; for Rooney, whose earlier novels tended to articulate feelings and opinions directly, it’s a liability. The narrator is forced to cheat by guessing at what’s going through the characters’ heads, making the tone not just generic but wishy-washy: “He appeared to give this some thought, or perhaps made a show of doing so.” 29

These and other blunders become predictable to the point of accidental comedy, such as when the word “very” appears four times in the epigraph. You could argue that in real life, people do laugh or fall silent or begin sentences with “Well,” but I’d say plausibility is a low bar for fiction, and definitely not worth the monotonous repetition. 30

Based on how often the characters look at their shoes, phones, or mirrors, it’d be easy to take some cheap shot at the putative narcissism, social withdrawal, or tech addiction of millennials. My point is simply that this book shouldn’t contain all of the following lines: 31

She dropped her gaze into her lap 32

She dropped her gaze to the ground 33

Simon dropped his gaze down to his feet 34

Alice looked at Felix, who was gazing down at his feet 35

She lowered her gaze 36

she lowered her eyes 37

he smiled and lowered his eyes 38

she said nothing, and stared down at her feet 39

Alice stared down at her lap 40

Alice stared across the table 41

Eileen stared at the screen for a while 42

For a few seconds Eileen stared down at the screen of her phone 43

she glanced up and smiled politely before returning her attention to the screen 44

she glanced at him once more 45

He glanced over his shoulder once more at the exit 46

She glanced back once over her shoulder 47

Felix glanced at her over his shoulder 48

Alice looked struck by this, and glanced back over her shoulder 49

He glanced at himself in the mirror 50

he glanced at his own reflection in the mirror 51

Felix glanced at them in the rear-view mirror 52

Felix glanced at her in the mirror 53

[she] glanced quickly in the dim, blotchy mirror 54

She was staring wanly into the mirror 55

His eyes travelling over the slim figure in the mirror 56

Simon met his eyes in the mirror 57

Eileen met Felix’s eyes in the mirror 58

Their eyes met in the mirror 59

Exhausting, though not exhaustive—a full catalog of every time someone glances or looks or falls silent would be, no joke, at least 10 times longer. 63

I still grant that some readers might not mind the muddled politics or stylistic infelicities; as I said, I overlooked the latter myself in the first two books. The New Yorker once defended Rooney’s prose by arguing that the “quality of thought eliminates the need for pen-twirling rhetorical flourishes.” And it’s true that Rooney’s arguments are often thoughtful and her characters sturdy, even when the craft isn’t. 64

Maybe if you believe it’s too late for politics and unconscionable to spend too much time worrying about style on a dying planet, old-fashioned love stories with insightful protagonists and happy endings are good enough. But for a novel that condemns the dearth of beauty and taste in modern culture with such magisterial disappointment, it’s fair to ask whether it lives up to its own standards. What is ugly about plastic, after all, is that it is flimsy, prefab, and as long-lasting as it is popular. 65

Tony Tulathimutte Tony Tulathimutte is the author of the novel Private Citizens and the founder of CRIT, a writing class in Brooklyn.

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Sally Rooney turns down an Israeli translation on political grounds

The writer has refused to sell Hebrew translation rights to her latest novel Beautiful World, Where Are You due to her stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict

Beautiful World, Where Are You book launched at a sold-out Waterstones event in London in September. Photograph: Vickie Flores/EPA

Sally Rooney has turned down an offer from the Israeli publisher that translated her two previous novels into Hebrew, due to her stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The Irish author’s second novel Normal People was translated into 46 languages, and it was expected that Beautiful World, Where Are You would reach a similar number. However, Hebrew translation rights have not yet been sold, despite the publisher Modan putting in a bid.

Sally Rooney. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

In a statement released on Tuesday, Rooney explained her decision, writing that while she was “very proud” to have had her previous novels translated into Hebrew, she has for now “chosen not to sell these translation rights to an Israeli-based publishing house”.

The statement expressed her desire to support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS), a campaign that works to “end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law”.

“Earlier this year, the international campaign group Human Rights Watch published a report entitled A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. That report, coming on the heels of a similarly damning report by Israel’s most prominent human rights organization B’Tselem, confirmed what Palestinian human rights groups have long been saying: Israel’s system of racial domination and segregation against Palestinians meets the definition of apartheid under international law,” Rooney’s statement read.

“Of course, many states other than Israel are guilty of grievous human rights abuses. This was also true of South Africa during the campaign against apartheid there. In this particular case, I am responding to the call from Palestinian civil society, including all major Palestinian trade unions and writers’ unions.”

She went on to acknowledge that not everyone will agree with her, but that she did not feel it would be right to collaborate with an Israeli company “that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.

“The Hebrew-language translation rights to my new novel are still available, and if I can find a way to sell these rights that is compliant with the BDS movement’s institutional boycott guidelines, I will be very pleased and proud to do so. In the meantime I would like to express once again my solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom, justice and equality”, she said.

The statement confirms the news published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz last month, which reported that “when Modan approached Rooney’s agent in an attempt to sign another translation deal, the agent announced that Rooney supports the cultural boycott movement on Israel and therefore does not approve translation into Hebrew”.

In May, the 30-year-old writer signed A Letter Against Apartheid, which called for “an immediate and unconditional cessation of Israeli violence against Palestinians”, and asked governments to “cut trade, economic and cultural relations”. Nan Goldin, Mykki Blanco and Naomi Klein were among the other signatories.

Gitit Levy-Paz, a fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, wrote a column for the Jewish news platform Forward criticising the author’s decision. “The very essence of literature, its power to bring a sense of coherence and order to the world, is negated by Rooney’s choice to exclude a group of readers because of their national identity”, she claimed.

Others have argued that Rooney was right to take this stand and support BDS. Tribune magazine editor Ronan Burtenshaw wrote that the writer’s decision was “no surprise”, based on her previous assertions. “You can’t publish with Modan and respect the boycott. Simple as.”

Earlier this year, Roger Waters, the co-founder of Pink Floyd, and singer-songwriter Patti Smith took a similar position to Rooney, joining more than 600 musicians in signing an open letter encouraging artists to boycott performances at Israel’s cultural institutions in order to “support the Palestinian people and their human right to sovereignty and freedom”. In 2018, an open letter was published in the Guardian in which artists called for a boycott of the Eurovision song contest 2019, which was being hosted in Israel.

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In Sally Rooney’s new novel, a celebrity author fights her own brand

Beautiful World, Where Are You is unlikely to be a crowd pleaser. But it’s gorgeous.

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Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney. Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Early on in Sally Rooney’s fraught and lovely new novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, it becomes clear that one of the big problems Rooney is struggling with on the page is herself. Or rather, the phenomenon of herself.

Since her first book came out in 2017, Rooney has gone from much-admired young writer to Instagram status symbol to metaphor for everything that is ailing white middle-class millennials. And she’s done it all, apparently, without much caring for the experience.

“I can’t believe I have to tolerate these things — having articles written about me, and seeing my photograph on the internet, and reading comments about myself,” says Alice, the celebrity novelist who is one of the four central characters of Beautiful World, Where Are You. “When I put it like that, I think: that’s it? And so what? But the fact is, although it’s nothing, it makes me miserable, and I don’t want to live this kind of life.”

Alice’s discontent with her life and her work is one of the chief animating forces of the novel. Like Rooney’s previous books — 2017’s Conversations with Friends and 2019’s Normal People — Beautiful World, Where Are You might be reductively summarized as being about the interesting love lives of a set of intellectually discontented young Marxist Dubliners. At its core, it is obsessed with the same set of questions that have always preoccupied Rooney: As the world collapses all around us, is it morally defensible to devote your life to love, relationships, and the aesthetic pleasure of books? What if you get rich from it?

Rating : 4 out of 5

Alice is the principal character in our first dyad. Like Rooney, Alice recently published two novels that were met with a level of acclaim she finds baffling. She has recently suffered a nervous breakdown, and now she is convalescing in an enormous borrowed house in a tiny Irish town. There, she strikes up a relationship with Felix, a warehouse worker she meets on Tinder who tells her flatly that he never plans to read her novels. They embark on a relationship animated simultaneously by Felix’s apparent disdain for Alice and her own fawning admiration for him, and by their shared understanding that this apparent dynamic is fundamentally false, and masks something murkier occurring between them under the surface.

Our other couple is firmly rooted in Dublin. There, Alice’s best friend Eileen works a poorly paid job at a literary magazine, grieves her recent breakup with a longtime boyfriend, and lives in a flatshare with a married couple. She’s nearing 30, and she’s beginning to fear that she’ll never really grow up.

Eileen’s strongest support system is with her childhood friend Simon: 35, handsome, wealthy, and saintly. Eileen and Simon are plainly in love with each other from page one, but their five-year age gap makes the power dynamics of their Emma-Knightley-esque friendship so fraught that they can only approach the possibility of a relationship on tiptoe, pretending they don’t realize what they’re doing.

Rooney gives us these two love stories in highly distant third-person prose. The narrator’s eye is like a camera’s lens, showing us only her characters’ physical movements, their dialogue, the emotions their facial expressions might seem to suggest. We have no access to what’s going on inside their heads, no way of knowing when they are lying to themselves or to each other, outside of minute tells: Alice tucking her hair behind one ear when she runs into Felix; Eileen coming straight home to microwave refrigerated leftovers covered in cling film.

The only time we begin to get a glimpse of their interior monologues comes in the chapters that bridge the book’s two romances: long, discursive emails between Eileen and Alice. There, they comfortably transition back and forth between gossiping about their love lives and careers to heady intellectual debates about why civilizations collapse, whether it matters to the vast majority of humanity if they do, and whether beauty matters when so much of the rest of the world is miserable. Eileen thinks humanity lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, “when plastics became the most widespread material in existence;” Alice thinks it happened after the fall of the Berlin wall.

Beautiful World, Where Are You gets much of its tension from the disconnect between the spare prose of the third-person sections and the rambling soliloquies of the emails between Eileen and Alice. As they remind each other in their emails over and over again, they both know that the world is in a state of crisis. The environment is collapsing, reactionary right-wing political movements are on the upswing, and most of the world’s population lives in grinding poverty to subsidize the unconscionable wealth of the rest of the world.

Yet, in their day-to-day lives, they both seem to find themselves most often concerned with their romantic travails, their careers, their families and friendships, and the art that moves them and brings them pleasure. The contradiction strikes them as by turns insufferably immoral and beautifully human.

Rooney’s earlier novels kept this debate mostly subtextual. It was the visceral, erotic tug between her characters that pulled the reader in, that lit up her sparse prose and turned her books into sensations. Beautiful World, in contrast, is unlikely to be quite such a hit with readers, however successful it is on its own terms. It takes place very determinedly outside of the realm of the body. The love stories exist, but the ethical problem of art is what this novel is capital-A About.

“The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth,” Alice proclaims in one email to Eileen. “Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter? So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world — packing it down tightly underneath the glittering surface of the text.”

Within the framework of this debate, turning a novelist like Sally Rooney into a merch-hawking celeb does feel as though it’s in such poor taste as to be almost violent. It detaches Rooney the human being and Rooney the artist from Rooney the brand name, whose primary value is its ability to make money for Rooney’s publisher. Books, in this world, are only barely morally defensible as it is, given their limited ability to fix society’s ills. Thinking about them as tools by which to mine wealth and social capital from the celebrity ecosystem — turning novelists into brand names — would be willfully dehumanizing.

But Rooney does offer us a possible solution to the terrible moral problem of the novel. Toward the end of Beautiful World, we take a trip to a wedding, that traditional climax of a marriage novel. At last, the camera lens through which we’ve been seeing the world breaks, and we slip seamlessly into our characters’ minds and bodies, the sensual details that occupy them most, in a long lyrical, ecstatic burst of prose.

Here, finally, is the end of alienation. Here, finally, is what it means to live life in a body, as a human being, not as a dry, mechanical observer or as a bodiless brain in cyberspace. That is what novels can offer us, even bourgeois realist novels, and especially Rooney’s earlier novels. And that, she seems to argue, is what matters most of all.

It is also what makes Beautiful World, for me, even more moving than Normal People or Conversations with Friends, although I think it’s unlikely to be a crowd-pleaser on the level the other two novels were. There is something tender about the way Rooney turns again and again to the novel, almost against her will, as though, Mr. Darcy-like, she has struggled in vain to deny her true feelings. Beautiful World, Where Are You is still very dialectical and Marxist and interested in political debates. Yet it is also a love letter to the novel as a form of art — and, by extension, to the ways in which human beings relate to one another.

Beautiful World, Where Are You is a love letter to all of us, to all the ways we love. It’s much sweeter and smarter than all the merch would lead you to believe.

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Beautiful World, Where Are You Chapter Sampler

Download the first chapter of a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends.

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 ch Download the first chapter of a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends.

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One chapter simply is not enough! I am hooked. The first chapter has captured my attention and ends on a cliffhanger, leaving me eager to know more.

Rooney excels at portraying the intensity and complexity of human relationships. This is evident here, even within the short few pages of the first chapter. From the excerpt I’ve read, I believe Alice is an enigmatic character and I’m looking forward to learning more about her when the book comes out in September.

Rooney’s descriptive writing is spe One chapter simply is not enough! I am hooked. The first chapter has captured my attention and ends on a cliffhanger, leaving me eager to know more.

Rooney’s descriptive writing is spectacular. Her ability to tell the reader plenty of information about the characters & their lives while saying relatively little, is mesmerising. I am excited to read more!

The first chapter of Sally Rooney’s new novel ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You’ intensely hooks the reader into the world of Alice, a successful Irish writer who has moved into a place by the sea to write a new book. As this is only one chapter it does contain a fantastic interaction between Alice and a local man named Felix, with whom she shares drinks and shows him her seaside house. I can already see a dynamic opening up and I am desperate to get my hands on the completed novel!

Thank you to The first chapter of Sally Rooney’s new novel ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You’ intensely hooks the reader into the world of Alice, a successful Irish writer who has moved into a place by the sea to write a new book. As this is only one chapter it does contain a fantastic interaction between Alice and a local man named Felix, with whom she shares drinks and shows him her seaside house. I can already see a dynamic opening up and I am desperate to get my hands on the completed novel!

I know that Sally Rooney is somewhat of a polarizing author in the book world for a variety of reasons, but I have to admit that the blurb for this book did draw me in. Reading the first chapter reminded me a little bit of Hemingway and the sparseness with which he writes. The interactions and descriptions are incredibly matter of fact without much attention given to the inner life of our characters. It didn’t necessarily bother me when reading this chapter, but I think that it would if I 4 stars

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The Straits Times

Beautiful World, Where Are You

By Sally Rooney
Fiction/Faber/Paperback/340 pages/$28.89/Available here from Sept 7
4 out of 5

Beautiful world, where are you? It is a question many will have asked in some form or other during this pandemic, though in fact it is a line from a 1788 German poem by Friedrich Schiller and has clearly consumed Irish novelist Sally Rooney long before Covid-19 struck.

Rooney, already feted for her debut Conversations With Friends (2017, available here), shot to astronomical acclaim for Normal People (2018, available here), which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into an Emmy-nominated drama.

As a result, she has become something like the literary patron saint of millennial crisis. This novel, her third, was so highly anticipated that advance copies were selling for around US$200 (S$270) on eBay, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The pressures of that anticipation seem to have been absorbed by the novel, which thrums with existential anxiety and constantly queries itself. Why, it asks, do books such as this exist, especially in a world on the verge of collapse?

There are four key characters, all millennials. Two, Alice and Eileen, best friends since college, are confronting being on the cusp of 30.

Alice, who became an incredibly famous novelist in her mid-20s, has secluded herself in small-town Ireland after a nervous breakdown. She starts dating Felix, a warehouse worker whom she met on Tinder and who has never read any of her books.

Eileen, once an academic prodigy, works for a pittance at a Dublin literary magazine, where she does tasks like standardise the spelling of «WH Auden» to «W.H. Auden».

Having been through a bad breakup, she is grappling with her «will-they-won’t-they» relationship with her childhood friend Simon, a political adviser.

This is basically a novel about people getting together and breaking up, of the variety Alice herself despises.

«Who can care,» she argues, «what happens to the novel’s protagonists, when it’s happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species?»

Her own work, she adds wryly, is the «worst culprit in this regard».

Readers are likely to identify Alice with her creator Rooney, who has pre-empted this. «What do the books gain by being attached to me, my face, my mannerisms, in all their demoralising specificity?» she has Alice lament.

And indeed there is a certain voyeuristic aspect to the narrative, which for the most part follows the characters around like a film camera, reporting the minute details of their movements and interactions while granting no access to their inner thoughts.

In wide-ranging, intellectual e-mails, they debate everything from the climate crisis to the late Bronze Age. They expatiate, rant and check each other’s privileges. It evokes the endangered art of letter writing, and is an illuminating epistolary depiction of friendship.

This is a novel of profound interiority, all the more remarkable for being crafted mostly out of detached exteriority. In the rare instance when it enters a character’s mind, the effect is marvellous.

During the wedding of Eileen’s sister, the narrative suddenly shifts into a Virginia Woolf-like slipstream, dipping in and out of people’s heads and diving into the depths of Eileen and Simon’s history.

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Прекрасный мир, где же ты

Салли Руни

Все четверо молоды, но жизнь уже наступает им на пятки. Они хотят друг друга, обманывают друг друга, сходятся и расстаются. Они занимаются сексом, беспокоятся о сексе, друзьях и мире, в котором живут. Действительно ли они стоят в последней освещенной комнате перед кромешной темнотой? Найдут ли они способ поверить в прекрасный мир?

Лучшая рецензия на книгу

18 июня 2022 г. 18:38

4 замечайте, когда вы счастливы!

Beautiful world, where are you?

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Beautiful World, Where Are You

A new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends

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Источник

Beautiful world where are you книга

Dearest Eileen—your email about what happened with Simon brought joy to my withered heart. You deserve romance! And so I feel does he. Can I tell you something about him that I promised I would never tell you but now I’m breaking the promise because the moment is opportune? A few years ago, just after you moved in with Aidan, Simon came over to see me one afternoon for coffee. We chatted about this and that, it was all very normal, and then when he was leaving, he stopped at the doorway of your old room to look inside. It was emptied out already, the bed was stripped, and I remember there was a pale rectangle on the wall where you used to have your Margaret Clarke poster. In a sort of fake-cheerful voice Simon said, ‘You’ll miss her.’ And without thinking about it, I answered, ‘So will you.’ It didn’t really make any sense, because you were actually moving closer to Simon’s neighbourhood, but he didn’t seem surprised that I had said it. He just replied like, ‘Yes, obviously.’ We stood there at the door of your room for a few more seconds and then he laughed and said: ‘Please don’t tell her I said that.’ Of course you were with Aidan at the time, so I never did tell you. And I can’t say I had always known, because I hadn’t. I knew you and Simon were very close, and I knew what had happened in Paris. But for some reason it had never occurred to me that he had been in love with you all along. I don’t think anyone knew. Anyway, we never talked about it again. Do you think it’s terrible of me to tell you all this? I hope not. It wasn’t very clear from your message whether you think you’re going to keep seeing each other or not … What do you feel?

Yesterday afternoon—just after I got your email, in fact—Felix started to tell me about some things he had done in the past and later regretted. I suppose it was one of those ‘worst things I’ve ever done’ conversations—and actually, he has done some pretty bad things. I won’t go into the details, but I can say some of it involved his relationships with women. I feel it’s not my place to judge him, because I can’t think why it should be, and because I’m occasionally wracked with guilt over horrible things I’ve done too. My impulse was actually to forgive him, especially because he has apparently spent a long time feeling remorseful and blaming himself. But I had to recognise it wasn’t my place to do that either, since the actions he described may have impacted other people’s lives permanently and would never have any effect on me. I can’t step in as a disinterested third party and absolve him of his sins, just as he can’t absolve me of mine. So I suppose whatever I felt for him when he confessed these actions wasn’t really ‘forgiveness’, but something else. Maybe just that I trusted that his remorse was real and that he wouldn’t make the same mistakes over again. It made me think about people who have done bad things—what they are supposed to do with themselves, and what we as a society are supposed to do with them. At the moment, the cycle of insincere public apologies is probably making everyone suspicious of forgiveness. But what should people who have done terrible things in the past actually do? Spontaneously advertise their own sins in order to pre-empt public exposure? Just try never to accomplish anything that might bring them increased scrutiny of any kind? Maybe I’m wrong, but I believe the number of people who have done seriously bad things is not insignificant. I mean honestly, I think if every man who had ever behaved somewhat poorly in a sexual context dropped dead tomorrow, there would be like eleven men left alive. And it’s not only men! It’s women too, and children, everyone. I suppose what I mean is, what if it’s not only a small number of evil people who are out there, waiting for their bad deeds to be exposed? What if it’s all of us?

You mentioned in your email that you heard a reading at Mass about a woman pouring oil on the feet of Jesus. I might be mistaken, because there are a few similar Gospel stories, but I think the one you mean is the passage in Luke where Jesus has his feet anointed by a sinful woman. I’ve just read over it again in the little Douay-Rheims translation I brought with me to the hospital. You’re right, the story is bizarre, and even (as you put it) freakish. But isn’t it also a little bit interesting? The woman in the story really only has one distinguishing characteristic: the fact that she’s led a sinful life. Who knows what she’s supposed to have done? Maybe she was just a social outcast, essentially a marginalised innocent. But on the other hand, maybe she had actually done some bad things, the kind of things you or I would think of as seriously wrong. It’s at least possible, isn’t it? She may have killed her husband, or abused her children, or something like that. And having heard that Jesus was staying with Simon the Pharisee, she came to the house, and at the sight of Jesus, she started crying so profusely that she wet his feet with her tears. After that, she dried his feet with her hair and anointed them with perfumed oil. As you point out, it all seems quite absurd, even vaguely erotic—and indeed, Simon the Pharisee seems shocked and uncomfortable that Jesus would allow a sinful woman to touch him in such an intimate way. But Jesus, characteristically puzzling, simply says that all her many sins are forgiven, because she loves him so much. Could it be that easy? We just have to weep and prostrate ourselves and God forgives everything? But maybe it’s not easy at all—maybe to weep and prostrate ourselves with genuine sincerity is the hardest thing we could ever learn how to do. I feel certain I don’t understand how to do it. I have that resistance in me, that hard little kernel of something, which I fear would not let me prostrate myself before God even if I believed in him.

On Monday evening at a quarter past eight, the main room of Simon’s apartment was empty and dim. Through the small window over the sink in the kitchenette, and the larger window in the living room opposite, the remaining daylight touched the various interior surfaces: the silver basin of the sink, with a single dirty plate and knife lying inside; the kitchen table, dotted here and there with crumbs; a fruit bowl containing one browning banana and two apples; a knitted throw sprawled over the sofa untidily; a thin grey layer of dust on the upper rim of the television; the bookcases, the table lamps, a chess set on the coffee table with what appeared to be an unfinished game on the board. This way in silence the room lay as the light faded, as outside in the hallway people climbed and descended the staircase, and in the street traffic swept past in waves of white sound. At twenty to nine came the noise of a key slipped into the lock, and then the apartment door opened. Simon was talking on the phone as he entered, taking a satchel off his shoulder with his free hand, saying aloud: No, I don’t think they’re worried about it, really. It’s just an annoyance. He was dressed in a dark-grey suit, with a green tie secured by a gold pin. Quietly he used his foot to close the door behind him and hung his bag up on a hook. Aha, he said. Is he there with you? I’ll talk to him now if you like. He went into the living room and turned on a floor lamp, dropped his keys on the coffee table. Okay, what do you think is best, then? he asked. Alone in the yellowish light of
the lamp, he looked tired. He went to the kitchen and picked the kettle up as if to test its weight. Yeah, he said. No, that’s fine, I’ll just tell him I’ve talked to you about it. Replacing the kettle in its cradle, he turned it on, and then sat down on a kitchen chair. Right, he said, but if I’m supposed to pretend you haven’t told me, what’s my pretext for calling him in the first place? He held the phone between his face and shoulder and started to unlace his shoes. Then, prompted by a remark on the other end of the call, he sat up and put the phone back into his hand again. Clearly that’s not what I meant, he said. The conversation continued like this for some time, while Simon took his shoes off, removed his tie and made himself a cup of tea. When the phone buzzed in his hand, he lifted it away quickly and checked the screen, while the voice on the other end went on talking. An email notification had appeared, with the subject heading ‘Tuesday call’. Apparently uninterested, he brought the phone back to his ear and carried the cup of tea over to the sofa to sit down. Yeah, yeah, he was saying, I’m home now. I’m just about to put the news on. He closed his eyes while the voice on the phone was speaking. Sure, he said. I’ll let you know. Love you too. Bye. He repeated this last word several times before tapping an icon on-screen to end the call. Looking down at the screen, he opened a messaging app and tapped the name ‘Eileen Lydon’. The most recent message was displayed at the bottom of the screen, with the time stamp 20:14.

Simon: Hey, I had a really nice time with you at the weekend. Would you like to see each other again this week?

An icon showed that Eileen had seen the message, but no response had arrived. He closed the app and opened the ‘Tuesday call’ email, which was part of a longer thread. A previous message read: Yes I am told they have phone records also. Simon or Lisa can you get across this please and get in touch with Anthony if needed. One of his colleagues had replied: If we spend any more time dealing with this non issue I am going to lose my mind. The newest message read: Simon I am attaching Anthony’s number and details below. Give him a ring tonight if possible or tomorrow morning? No one is happy about this but it’s where we are. Locking his phone, he allowed his eyes to close and for a few moments he sat on the sofa not moving, his chest rising and falling with his breath. After a time he lifted a hand and passed it slowly down his face. Finally he reached for the remote control and turned the television on. The nine o’clock news was just beginning. He sat watching the first few items roll past on the screen, his eyes half-closed, almost as if he was asleep, but sipping now and then from the cup of tea he kept on an arm of the couch beside him. During an item about road safety his phone buzzed, and he reached for it immediately. On-screen a new message displayed.

Eileen: oddly formal tone here Simon

He stared down at this message for several seconds, and then typed out a response.

An animated three-dot ellipsis displayed on-screen, to show that Eileen was typing.

Eileen: why do men over 30 text like they’re updating a LinkedIn profile

Eileen: Hi [Eileen], it was great seeing you on [Saturday]. Can we connect again? Try selecting a time and date from the drop down menu

Vaguely now he smiled to himself as his thumbs moved over the keyboard.

Simon: If only I were a younger man, I would manually turn off the autocaps function on my phone in order to seem more laidback

Eileen: it’s in settings

Eileen: I can help you find it if you get stuck

At the top of the screen, a new email appeared in the ‘Tuesday call’ thread. The opening text displayed as: Hi all. Have just heard from TJ … Simon dismissed the notification without opening it, and began typing another message to Eileen.

Simon: I’m always copy and pasting that message saying I had a nice time at the weekend, can we see each other again, etc.

Simon: Never had any complaints before

Eileen: you can use copy and paste?? I’m impressed

Eileen: anyway yes, we can see each other this week

Eileen: when is good?

Another message appeared at the top of the screen, from a contact listed as ‘Geraldine Costigan’.

Geraldine: Your dad says you can give him a ring tomorrow evening if that suits you sweetheart. xxx

Simon let out a long slow breath, and then swiped upward to dismiss the message. His eyes moving back and forth over the messages to and from Eileen, he typed the words Would you, and then deleted them. He scrolled back up to the previous texts and looked at them once more. Finally, he began typing again.

Simon: Are you busy just now?

The double tick showed that Eileen had seen the message, and then the ellipsis appeared.

Eileen: I was going to have a bath but my flatmates used all the hot water

Eileen: so I’m just lying on my bed looking at internet

On the television, the news had finished and the weather had come on. An illustrated yellow sun hovered over the Dublin region on the map. Simon started typing again.

Simon: Do you want to come over here?

Simon: Endless hot water

Simon: Ice cream in freezer

Simon: No flatmates

A few seconds passed. He rubbed at his jaw with his hand, watching the screen, which reflected on its surface the bulb of the ceiling light in its glass shade overhead.

Eileen: I was not fishing for an invite!!

Eileen: are you sure?

Eileen: it’s very nice of you

Simon: What can I say, I have a very nice personality

Eileen: it sounds like fun.…

Eileen: but I don’t want to intrude on you again!!

Simon: Put your shoes on, I’ll call you a taxi

Looking gratified, he closed out of the messages, opened a taxi app and ordered a driver to Eileen’s address. He rose from the sofa then, muted the television and went to the sink with his empty cup of tea. After washing up and wiping down the kitchen surfaces, he went into his room and made his bed. Several times while he carried out these tasks, he took his phone from his pocket and checked the taxi app, where a small icon representing Eileen’s cab moved slowly and hesitatingly along the quays and southward, and then, closing the app, he pocketed his phone again and returned to what he had been doing before.

When he answered the door twenty minutes later, Eileen was standing in the hallway wearing a cropped grey sweatshirt and a pleated cotton skirt, carrying a tote bag printed with the logo of a London literary magazine. She looked as if she had earlier been wearing dark lipstick but it had faded. He stood still in front of her for a moment before putting his hand to her waist and kissing her on the cheek. Good to see you, he said. She wrapped her arms around his neck, and he let her hold on to him in the doorway. Thank you for inviting me, she replied. They went inside. He closed the door behind them and she produced from her bag a bottle of red wine. I brought you this, she said. We don’t have to drink it, I just have a horror of coming over to someone’s house and not bringing anything. Especially your house. Imagine what my mother would say. Not that I brought anything last time I dropped by, ha ha. She put the bottle on the table and took her bag off her shoulder. Catching sight of the television, she said: Oh, are you watching Claire Byrne? I won’t interrupt. I’ll just sit quietly on the sofa. He was smiling, his eyes following Eileen as she hung her bag on the back of a kitchen chair and started to refix her hair, loosening the elastic tie that held it up in a bun. No, I’m not watching it, he said. You look nice. Would you like a cup of tea or something? Or a glass of wine if you’d rather. She went to sit on the couch, pulling off the flat leather
shoes she had been wearing and tucking up her feet in their white socks on the cushions. I’ll have tea, she said. I don’t actually feel like wine. Is this a puzzle? He glanced over from the kitchen and saw her pointing at the chessboard. No, he said, it’s a game. Peter was here last night, but he had to head off before we finished. Just as well for me. She went on looking at the board while he boiled the kettle and took a cup down from the press. Did you have the black pieces? she asked. With his back turned to her, he answered no, the white. You’re up two pawns, then, she said. And you can check him with your bishop. He was taking a spoon out of the cutlery drawer, amused. Think about it again, he said. She frowned at the board a little longer, while he made the tea and brought it over to the coffee table. Well, I won’t mess with it, she said. He sat down at the other end of the sofa and turned off the television. Work away, he said. It’s white to move. She picked up the white bishop and checked the black king. Leaning forward, he moved a black pawn to block the attack and threaten her bishop, and she used the bishop to take the pawn. He brought the black knight forward to take the bishop then and fork the white queen and rook. She made a face and said: I’m an idiot. He said it was his fault anyway for leaving himself in such a weak position. She picked up her cup of tea and sat back against the armrest of the sofa. Did I tell you my family are at war with each other about Lola’s wedding invites? she said. I really don’t know why I got involved, she’s just such a nightmare. Do you want to see the texts she’s been sending me? He said yes, and she took her phone out and showed him the message Lola had sent her on Saturday night.

Lola: Hmmm do I really want to hear about how immature I am from someone who’s stuck in a shitty job making no money and living in a kip at age 30..….

His eyes moved over the screen and then he took the device from her hand to read it again, frowning. Jesus, the hostility, he murmured.

Источник

Beautiful World, Where Are You: Sally Rooney’s new book will be published in September 2021

With the release of the illustrated cover for Sally Rooney’s new novel, ere’s everything we know about Beautiful World, Where Are You, which will be published in September 2021

I’m sure we can all agree that BBC Three’s televised adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People pretty much saved a lot of people in the first lockdown. We were obsessed with the on-screen retelling of Marianne and Connell’s love story and our enduring admiration for these well-crafted characters certainly didn’t end when the TV series did.

Of course, nobody who read the award-winning 2018 book was surprised by how good it was. Rooney is one of the freshest and most exciting contemporary names in the literary world, after all. That’s why we were very excited when it was recently announced that her debut novel, Conversations With Friends, is also getting the TV treatment.

And now, we’ve got even more Rooney news. The author’s third novel will be published on 7 September and today, 13 April, publisher’s Faber and Faber have released the cover for the book. Here’s your first look at Beautiful World, Where Are You.

Rooney’s third novel will be published on 7 September. Faber and Faber shared the news of the new book on Twitter back in January, alongside a photograph of the finished manuscript of Beautiful World, Where Are You.

Where are you

Oooh! Hoaoa! Oh Oha! Uhuh! Ojeah!
Everybody’s telling you what you wanna hear
so how you gonna know what’s fake and what’s real
who’s gonna tell you things ain’t so great
when your so-called friends won’t tell it to your face
fair weather, foul weather every kind of mood
I’ll be there for you standing like a tower or truth
who’s gonna get you through the sum of all fears
when the world is crum’bling around your ears

When the lights go out will you face the dark alone?
Or will you call my name?
‘Cause I’ll be there and I’ll be strong

Where are you? Where are you?
even the shadows call your name
oh, I will never be the same
while I keep searching on and on
living my life, living my life without you
Where are you?

Meet me in the garden come break of the day
reach into the dawn and you can touch my face
meet me in the morning it’s a beautiful place
seek me in the shadows where you thoughts all stray
everybody’s wondering where is the love
it’s the heartbeat beating on the wings of a dove
seek and you’ll find me never be ashamed
when I wrap my love around you then you’ll know my name

when the lights go out will you face the dark alone?
or will you call my name?
I’ll be there and I’ll be strong

Where are you?
Where are you?
Even the shadows call your name
oh, I will never be the same
while I keep searching on and on
living my life, living my life without you
Where are you? Where are you?
Ohoaha!
Where are you?
Oaha! Oooh!
I’ll be there and I’ll be strong!

Where are you? Where are you?
even the shadows call your name
oh, I will never be the same
while I keep searching on and on
living my life, living my life without you
without you
even the shadows call your name
oh, I will never be the same
while I keep searching on and on
living my life, living my life without you
Where are you?

Где ты?

Все говорят тебе то, что ты хочешь услышать
Так, как ты узнаешь, что ложь, а что правда?
Кто расскажет тебе нелицеприятные вещи,
Когда твои так называемые друзья не скажут тебе их в лицо?
Прекрасная погода, отвратительная погода, в любом настроении
Я буду рядом с тобой, возвышаясь, словно башня истины
Кто проведет тебя сквозь множество страхов,
Когда мир рушится вокруг тебя?

Когда погаснут огни, ты встретишь тьму одна?
Или ты позовешь меня по имени?
Ибо я явлюсь, и я буду силен

Где ты? Где ты?
Даже тени зовут тебя по имени,
О, я никогда не стану таким же
Пока я продолжаю снова и снова искать,
Проживая свою жизнь, проживая свою жизнь без тебя
Где ты?

Встреть меня в саду на рассвете,
Окунись в зарю, и ты можешь коснуться моего лица
Встреть меня утром, это прекрасное место
Ищи меня в полумраке, где бродят все твои мысли
Все хотят знать, где же любовь
Это биение сердца, пульсирующее на крыльях голубки
Ищи, и ты обнаружишь, что мне нечего стыдиться,
Когда я окутаю тебя своей любовью,
Тогда ты узнаешь мое имя

Когда погаснут огни, ты встретишь тьму одна?
Или ты позовешь меня по имени?
Я явлюсь, и я буду силен

Где ты? Где ты?
Даже тени зовут тебя по имени,
О, я никогда не стану таким же
Пока я продолжаю снова и снова искать,
Проживая свою жизнь, проживая свою жизнь без тебя
Где ты? Где ты?
Где ты?
Я явлюсь, и я буду силен

Источник

Where Are You Now?

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О книге «Where Are You Now?»

It has been ten years since 21-year-old Kevin MacKenzie, Jr. («Mac»), has been missing. A Columbia University senior, about to graduate and already enrolled in Duke University Law School, he walked out of his room in Manhattan ‘s Upper West Side without a word to his college roommate and has never been seen again. However, he does make three ritual phone calls to his mother every year: on her birthday, on his birthday, and on Mother’s Day. Each time, he assures her he is fine, refuses to answer her frantic questions, then hangs up. Even the death of his father, a corporate lawyer, on 9/11 does not bring him home, or break the pattern of his calls.Mac’s sister Carolyn is now 26, a law school graduate, and has just been hired as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. She has endured two family tragedies-her brother’s inexplicable disappearance, and the loss of her father. Realizing that neither she nor her mother will ever be able to have closure and get on with their lives until they find her brother, she sets out to discover what happened to Mac, and why he has found it necessary to hide from them.Her journey into the world of people who willingly disappear from their own lives leads her to learn about others who may or may not still be alive, and ultimately to a deadly confrontation with someone close to her who suddenly becomes an enemy-and cannot allow her to disclose his secret…

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Beautiful world where are you книга

God, it’s been ages, said Leanne. Here, do you know Paula’s friend Eileen?

Eileen stood against the kitchen table stroking her necklace absently with a fingertip, looking back at him.

Ah, he said, we know each other rather well, actually.

Eileen started to laugh then, touching her lip with her tongue.

Oh, said Leanne. I’m sorry, I didn’t realise.

Taking a bottle of wine out of his bag, he said in a relaxed tone: No, that’s alright. Eileen and I grew up together.

Yes, Simon was very fond of me when I was a baby, Eileen said. He used to carry me around my back garden and give me little kisses. So my mother says.

He was smiling to himself, unscrewing the cap from his bottle of wine. Even as a child of five I had beautiful taste, he said. Only the finest babies made the grade.

Glancing back and forth between them now, Leanne asked Simon if he was still working in Leinster House. For my sins, he said. Do you see a glass handy? Leanne said all the glasses were dirty, but there were plastic cups on the table. Let me find a dirty one, I’ll wash it, he said. Eileen informed Leanne that Simon would no longer use plastic cups, out of respect for Mother Earth. Simon, who was rinsing a wine glass under the cold tap, said: She does make me sound insufferable, doesn’t she? But Leanne, tell me, how is work? Leanne started to tell him about her job, with specific reference to some colleagues of hers who were friends of his. A man in a denim jacket came inside from the back yard, pulling the door behind him, saying aloud to no one in particular: Getting cold out there. Through the kitchen doorway, Eileen caught the eye of their friend Peter, and waving her hand she went out to greet him. She glanced back once over her shoulder to see Simon and Leanne in conversation, Simon leaning against the kitchen countertop, Leanne standing in front of him, twisting a lock of her hair between her fingers.

The living room was small and cramped, with a staircase against one wall and potted plants on the bookcases, leaves trailing over the spines of books. Peter was at the fireplace taking his jacket off, talking to Paula about the same political controversy Eileen had discussed with her father the evening before. No, no one comes out of it looking good, Peter was saying. Well, except Sinn Féin, obviously. Someone had connected their phone to the speakers and an Angel Olsen song started playing, while from the hallway their friend Hannah came inside. Peter and Eileen allowed their conversation to taper off while Hannah made her way over to join them, holding a bottle of wine by the neck, bangles clinking on her wrists. Immediately she started to tell a story about a problem with the garage door at her house that afternoon, and how long they’d had to wait for the workman to arrive, and how she had been late to meet her mother for lunch in town. While Eileen listened, her eyes travelled back to the kitchen doorway, through which Simon’s figure was still partly visible, still leaning against the countertop, though several other people had joined him now. Following her gaze, Peter said: The big man. I didn’t know he was here. Hannah had found a clean plastic cup on the coffee table and was pouring herself a drink. She asked who they were talking about and Peter said Simon. Oh, I hope he’s brought Caroline, Hannah replied. At this remark Eileen’s attention moved quickly from the kitchen doorway back to Hannah. No, Paula said, not tonight. Hannah was screwing the cap back on her bottle while Eileen watched. That’s a shame, Hannah said. Leaving the bottle down on the coffee table, she caught Eileen’s eye, and asked: Have you met her yet, Eileen?

Caroline, Eileen repeated. Is that…?

The girl Simon is seeing, Paula said.

Eileen was smiling now, with some perceptible effort. No, she answered. No, we haven’t met.

Hannah swallowed a mouthful of wine and went on: Oh, she’s great. You’ll love her. You’ve met her, Peter, haven’t you?

Turning as if to address Eileen, he said: Yeah, she seemed nice. And she’s only about ten years younger than him, so that’s an improvement.

You are horrible, Hannah retorted.

Eileen gave a brittle laugh. I never get to meet them, she said. For some reason he doesn’t like to introduce me, I don’t know why.

How curious, said Peter.

I’m sure that’s not true, said Hannah.

To Eileen, Peter went on: Because, you know, I’ve always had that little question mark about the two of you.

Hannah let out a horrified laugh, and grabbed Eileen by the upper arm. Don’t listen to him, she said. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Their friend Roisin came up to join them then, wanting to ask Peter for his take on the same political controversy they had been discussing before. When Eileen went to the kitchen at midnight for another drink, she stopped to look through the back window, where Simon’s figure was visible dimly, talking to the woman whose name was Leanne. A cigarette was hanging loosely between Leanne’s index and middle fingers, and with her other hand she was touching Simon’s shirt collar. Eileen put the bottle away and left the kitchen. In the living room Roisin was sitting on Peter’s lap for the purpose of acting out a funny anecdote. Eileen stood by the sofa sipping her drink, smiling at the punchline while everyone laughed. Afterwards she went out to the hallway and took her jacket from underneath a few others that had been left on the same hook. She went out the front door then and closed it behind her. The air outside was cool. Behind her the living room window of Paula’s house was lit up, a deep warm golden colour, and from within came the muted noise of music and voices. Eileen took her phone from her pocket. The time on the screen was 00:08. She went out the front gate onto the pavement and put her hands into the pockets of her jacket.

Before she had reached the corner of the street, the door of Paula’s house opened up again and Simon came out onto the front step. Without closing the door behind him, he called out: Hey, are you leaving? Eileen turned around. Between them the street was empty and dark, the curved hoods of parked cars reflecting the streetlights dimly. Yeah, she said. He stood there for a moment just looking at her, maybe frowning. Well, can I walk you home? he asked. She shrugged. Wait there for a second, he said. He went back inside and she stood with her hands in her pockets, elbows out, staring down at the cracked pavement surface. When he re-emerged and closed the door behind him, the sound echoed against the walls of the terrace opposite. Bending down, he unlocked his bicycle from the railing of Paula’s front yard, and then put his bike lock and key into the canvas bag he had brought with him. She stood watching him. Straightening up again, he wheeled his bike over to where she was standing. Hey, he said. Is everything okay? She nodded her head. You left kind of abruptly, he said. I was looking for you.

You couldn’t have been looking for very long, she said. It’s an extremely small house.

He gave a kind of puzzled smile. No, well, you hadn’t been gone for very long, he said. You’re only about fifty feet from the door.

Eileen started walking again and Simon went along with her, his bike clicking quietly between them.

I thought it was nice of Leanne to try and introduce us earlier, he said.

Yes, I noticed she got a hug. I didn’t even get a handshake.

He laughed. I know, I really behaved myself, didn’t I? he said. But I think she got the idea.

Tonelessly, Eileen said: Did she.

Looking down at her now, he was frowning again. Well, I didn’t want to embarrass you, he answered. What do you think I should have said? Oh, Eileen and I don’t need to be introduced. Actually, we’re lovers.

And are we? she asked.

Hm. I suppose that’s one of those words nobody uses anymore.

They reached the corner of the street and took a left to leave the estate and walk back toward the main road. Above them, narrow trees planted at intervals along the footpath, in full leaf. Eileen’s hands were still in her pockets. She cleared her throat, and then said aloud: Your friends were just telling me how great this person Caroline is. The girl you’re seeing. They all seem very fond of her, she’s obviously made a big impression
.

Simon was looking at Eileen as she spoke, but she was staring fixedly at the pavement ahead. Right, he said.

I didn’t realise you’d introduced her to everyone.

Not everyone, he said. She’s come out for drinks with us a couple of times, that’s all.

Almost inaudibly Eileen murmured: Jesus.

For a time neither of them spoke again. Finally he said: I did tell you I’d been seeing someone.

Am I the only one of your friends who hasn’t met her? she asked.

I know how this sounds, but I really have been trying to do everything right. It’s just—You know, it’s not the most straightforward situation.

Simon seemed to consider this. After a moment he said: Look, I understand you’re feeling upset, but I’m not sure if you’re being completely fair.

I’m not upset, she answered.

His eyes moved over the street ahead of them. Seconds went by in silence while they walked, cars passing beside them on the road. Finally he said: You know, when I asked you out in February, you told me you just wanted to be friends. You never—and I’m not trying to be accusatory, I’m just giving you my perspective—you never showed any interest in me at all until I told you I was seeing someone else. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on that.

Eileen’s head was bent forward, showing the long line of her neck over the collar of her jacket, her eyes on the pavement. She said nothing.

He went on: And when you did find out I was seeing someone, you decided you wanted to flirt with me and call me on the phone at night, okay, and then you want to come over when I’m in bed and we mess around or whatever, that’s fine, I don’t mind. As far as I can see, I’ve been very clear with you, there is someone else, but it’s not exclusive, so if you want to sleep over in my apartment there’s no problem. I’m not pressuring you to make any decisions about where we stand with each other, I’m happy to just spend time together and see how things go. From everything you said, I assumed that’s what you wanted. And it’s been really nice, for me at least. I completely understand why it’s awkward for you to hear our friends talking about someone else I’m seeing, but it’s not like you didn’t know she existed.

While he spoke Eileen lifted her hand to her face, pushing her hair back roughly off her forehead, tension visible in her shoulders, in her neck, in the sharp almost jerking movements of her fingers. Jesus, she repeated. How Christian of you.

What does that mean? he asked.

With a laugh that sounded almost frightened she said: I can’t believe I’ve been such a fool.

They had stopped walking, outside the entrance to a block of flats, beneath a streetlight. He was looking at her with concern. No, he said. You haven’t been a fool. And I’m sorry I’ve upset you. It’s the last thing I wanted to do, believe me. I haven’t even seen Caroline this week. If I gave you the impression that I’d broken things off with her after last weekend, I’m really sorry.

She was covering her face, her hands scrubbing at her eyes, and her voice when she spoke was muffled and indistinct. Oh God, she was murmuring. I just thought—No, I don’t even know what I thought.

Eileen, what do you want? Because if you seriously want us to be together, I can end things with Caroline any time. I’d be happy to, more than happy. But if you don’t want that, and we’re just playing around and having fun, then, you know. I can’t be single for the rest of my life because it suits you better. I have to, at some point, I have to get over that. Do you see what I’m saying? I’m just trying to figure out what you want.

Closing her eyes, she said nothing for several seconds. Then she said in a low even voice: I want to go home.

Right, he said. You mean now?

She was nodding her head, her eyes shut.

The fastest thing is probably just to keep walking, he said. Is that okay? I’ll see you to your door.

She answered yes. In silence they made their way to Thomas Street and turned left, walking over toward St Catherine’s. At the traffic lights a few cars were idling, and a taxi with its light turned on. Without speaking they walked down Bridgefoot Street and crossed the bridge at Usher’s Island. Streetlights fragmented and dissolved on the black surface of the river. Finally they reached the entrance of Eileen’s apartment building and stood together under the projecting arch of the external doorway. He looked at her, and with her head held straight she looked back at him. After taking a deep breath in, she said effortfully: Let’s just forget about it, can we? He waited a moment as if to let her continue, but she didn’t. I’m sorry to sound stupid, he answered, but about what, do you mean? She went on looking at him, her face thin and pale. I suppose about the whole thing, she said. And we can just be friends again. He started to nod his head while she watched him. Sure, he said. That’s alright. I’m glad we’ve talked about it. He paused briefly and then added: I’m sorry if you thought I was ignoring you at Paula’s house. I had been looking forward to seeing you, very much. I didn’t mean to make you feel ignored. But that’s all. I’m going to head home now, okay? I may not see you during the week, but in any case we’ll see each other at the wedding. She seemed to swallow, and then asked haltingly: Is Caroline going to be there? I know you said you were thinking about bringing her. He looked up at Eileen then, and started to smile. Ah no, he said. I never invited her in the end. But if that was all you wanted, you could have just told me. No need for such advanced tactics. She turned her face away, shaking her head. No, it wasn’t that, she said. He went on observing her a moment longer, and then said in a friendly voice: Not to worry. See you soon. He walked away, the wheels of his bicycle padded and quiet on the paved street surface.

Alice, I am feeling a bit mystified that you’re on another work trip already. When we talked back in February, I got the impression you were leaving Dublin because you didn’t want to see people, and you needed time to rest and recover. When I expressed my concerns about you being on your own all the time, you actually told me that was what you needed. I find it a little bit strange that you’re now sending me these chatty emails about the award ceremonies you’re attending in Paris. If you’re feeling better and you’re happy to be back at work, that’s great, obviously. But presumably you’re flying from Dublin airport for all these trips? Could you not have let any of your friends know you were going to be in town? You obviously didn’t tell Simon or myself, and Roisin has just told me she texted you two weeks ago and got no reply. I completely understand if you’re not feeling up to being sociable, but then maybe you’re pushing yourself to get back to work too quickly. Do you see what I mean?

Источник

Beautiful World, Where Are You: Fintan O’Toole on Sally Rooney’s tense, very risky new novel

Review: Even when the characters in Rooney’s third novel are overwrought, her writing never is

Sally Rooney photographed by Ellius Grace/New York Times

Sally Rooney is regarded, not without reason, as the novelist who best expresses the lives of those born into the western middle class in the 1990s. But she has written, in Beautiful World, Where Are You, a 19th-century novel. It is, paradoxically, a bold choice. Nothing, for her, could be less safe.

Her title comes from a Friedrich Schiller poem set to music by Franz Schubert in 1819. The novel itself refers back to Leo Tolstoy in the way it combines the small world of love and intimacy with the large one of politics and ideas, putting the extremely private side by side with the very public.

One strand of it could be plucked from Jane Austen in the way the characters struggle to interpret each other’s desires and in its shape as a good old-fashioned marriage plot. Henry James is a ghostly presence. Rooney, hailed as the voice of the young, is very deliberately placing herself in venerable company.

Sally Rooney takes the very considerable risk of allowing the experiences of her character Alice to mirror, in career terms, her own. Alice is a young writer deeply unhappy about waking one morning to find herself an international literary star

For another writer, all of this might amount to an exercise in literary nostalgia or insupportable hubris. But what makes it so intriguing here is that Rooney’s characters are emphatically not Isabel Archer or Elizabeth Bennett.

They are, like Rooney herself, turning 30. They live in a very 21st-century world of precarious employment, rampant consumerism, inadequate housing, fluid sexuality, social-media saturation, instant celebrity and the existential dread of the climate crisis.

But Rooney is not content to be contemporary. She is asking throughout the novel: what does contemporary mean? Is there even such a thing as “now”? Can this present moment express itself in anything other than a free-floating purposelessness, a slow descent into civilisational collapse?

In one of the long discursive emails between them that shape the book’s intellectual architecture, Eileen, who works as a badly paid editor for a Dublin literary magazine, suggests to her friend Alice, a hypersuccessful novelist, that “our political vocabulary has decayed so deeply and rapidly since the twentieth century that most attempts to make sense of our present historical moment turn out to be essentially gibberish”.

But Alice seems to suspect that this may be true not just of political vocabulary but of the novel itself. She is deeply unhappy about her own Byronic experience of waking one morning to find herself an international literary star.

Rooney takes the very considerable risk of allowing Alice’s experiences to mirror, in career terms, her own. She “signed an American book deal for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars” when she was 24. She has published two novels. She jets off to Rome for interviews and readings. People who meet her for the first time Google her name for all the gossip.

The obvious risk is that of a ‘poor me’ solipsism. But Rooney counters it with a passionate and searching inquiry into the connection between the problem of writing and the problem of living. What form can the experience – economic, sexual, historical, political – of her generation take?

She can’t bear it. She is filled with self-contempt: “I keep encountering this person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my energy.” This disgust seeps into her sense of her own novels: “I find my own work morally and politically worthless.”

The obvious risk here is that of a “poor me” solipsism. But Rooney counters it with a passionate and searching inquiry into the connection between the problem of writing and the problem of living. In both guises, the question is the same: what form can the experience – economic, sexual, historical, political – of her generation take?

This is what connects the book so strongly to the writers of the Enlightenment and of the 19th century. Faced with the disruptions of an emerging modernity, this was their primary question.

Now, faced with the disruptions attendant on the end of that modernity, Rooney asks it again. Her answer, intriguingly, is that perhaps there are no new forms – of writing, of personal connection, of belief in something that gives meaning to the world. Perhaps there is nothing for it but to reoccupy the old ones with renewed vigour.

This argument plays out in both the form and the content of the novel. Rooney has previously used an 18th-century form – the epistolary novel, albeit updated to the world of texting and messaging. But here she adds a style that might be old hat for others but that is radically new for her: a classic 19th-century omniscient narrative.

Sally Rooney photographed in Dublin by Ellius Grace/New York Times

She also uses the emails between Alice and Eileen to return to the earlier form of the novel in which the line between the essay (which is really what these long missives are) and fiction was more blurred.

The content – the complex emotional lives of her four characters – mirrors this testing of forms. Rooney charts two relationships: Alice’s with Felix, the edgy man she picks up on Tinder while she is living alone in a big house on the west coast; and Eileen’s with Simon, who is five years older and a friend and protector since childhood.

Alice thinks that she will explore with Felix what Eileen calls “relational formlessness and experimental affective bonds”, that, in other words, they can carry on together without defining where they stand in relation to each other. Eileen torments herself with anxiety about whether Simon is her friend, her lover or, indeed, a slightly creepy kind of fantasy father figure.

Alice and Felix are both bisexual, but we get no real idea of what this might mean for their emotional and physical relationships. It feels more like a signifier than something that is fully signified

There is something a little schematic in the way this is set up. Alice and Felix, for example, are both bisexual, but we get no real idea of what this might mean for their emotional and physical relationships. It feels more like a signifier than something that is fully signified.

Equally, the gap between Eileen’s shining intelligence and articulacy on the one side and her lack of emotional self-knowledge, and inability to tell Simon what she wants, on the other sometimes stretches too widely. At times the essay weighs too heavily on the fiction – the convoluted “affective bonds” of the lovers serve the wider argument too well.

But Rooney’s prose – cool, transparent, almost scientific in its rigour – makes the story work, sentence by sentence. For all Alice and Eileen’s despair at the inadequacy of public language, Rooney is always making the opposite case with her clarity of expression. Even when her characters are overwrought, her writing never is.

What this sets up is a rich tension between the “relational formlessness” of the love lives Rooney is exploring and the formality of the book. If the question is what kind of shape can be given to these constantly fluctuating emotions, the answer is, after all, the good old novel itself. Rooney shows that is still a sturdy and tolerant container, able to hold in place all this flux of feelings and ideas, to absorb even its own imperfections and hesitancies.

The characters essentially find their way into a classic 19th-century novel. Fortunately for them, and for us, it is a very good one, written with immense skill and illuminated by an endlessly incisive intelligence

The book reaches not so much after resolution as towards a kind of poignant resignation. Alice and Felix, Eileen and Simon, cannot, in the end, invent new ways of being, or even of being in love.

They move awkwardly towards the need to occupy in their own fashion the existing ones: the duty of kindness, the imperative of going on even in the face of despair, a wary, nonreligious return to some idea of God, and – most shockingly – monogamous heterosexuality.

They find their way, in other words, into a classic 19th-century novel. Fortunately for them, and for us, it is a very good one, written with immense skill and illuminated by an endlessly incisive intelligence.

Fintan O’Toole

Fintan O’Toole is an Irish Times columnist and writer

Источник

Beautiful world where are you книга

Beautiful world where are you книга

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Sally Rooney

Лучшая рецензия на книгу

4 замечайте, когда вы счастливы!

Прекрасный мир, где же ты

Салли Руни

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Beautiful World, Where Are You

Sally Rooney

4 Руни сильна в описании статики, но не динамики отношений

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