Beautiful World, Where Are You

by

Paperback, 337 pages

English language

Published by Faber.

ISBN:
978-0-571-36544-9
Copied ISBN!
(2 reviews)

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a wharehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.

Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young - but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they worry about sex and friendship and the times they live in. Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

3 editions

reviewed Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Quartett of Indifference

(quotes not literal, just from memory) "Is it okay if I sleep with you?" - "That would be okay" - "I can also leave if you prefer that" - "Yeah if you'd like to leave you can do that"

"So you're still seeing someone else?" - "Yeah, but if you'd like me to, I could leave her" - "What do you want?" - "No what do you want?" - leaves him

right after sex "I don't like you, but I don't hate you either"

Oh god I just want to shake them all, why can't you just say what you want. None of those four characters ever does.

Well this book is very Rooney. If you enjoyed Conversations with Friends or Normal People, you'll like this as well. If not, don't bother.

reviewed Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

the writing! but the characters!

I don’t have to like the characters in the books I read (and actually as a former EngLit prof, find that way of reading for likeability or relatedness to be super limiting). But having said that, with every single Rooney novel, I struggle with frustration and wanting to shake the characters, especially the young women. I think this is probably the point of it all? This is gorgeously written, especially the third-person chapters describing the characters’ actions etc and the cinematic looking-at-ness of those sections (she tells you insistently what it looks like the characters are feeling from their actions rather than telling you how they feel). But I still wondered the whole time, as I have with Normal and Conversations, why I was reading it.