Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney
Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.
Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young―but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
I have read Sally Rooney before (I read “Normal People” last summer…highly recommend)….I really appreciated her dry, sorta dark, sarcastic and powerful way of writing.
She continues to have that in this book times a million.
I enjoy the way she writes dialogue…both in the out loud conversations between characters and the inner thoughts of singular characters as well.
She has this way of keeping your feelings for the characters on a constant continuum….sometimes you love them, sometimes you hate them, sometimes you feel bad for them, sometimes you want to punch them, sometimes they delight you and sometimes they disgust you.
None of her characters are simple and straightforward, and their backstories are not either…. which I find to be VERY in touch with the realm of real life people.
Lots of mixed up and conflicting emotions for the characters AND for the reader.
Although….This story just felt WEIRD to me for a loooonnnggg while during reading…and not in a good way.
Because I generally LIKE weird….but it has to be the exact RIGHT kind of weird.
The story felt a little off and unlikeable.
Unlikeable doesn’t seem like quite the right kind of word….maybe uncomfortable is the proper adjective I’m searching for.
This story is mainly about friendship and about love, but also about sex and adulting and faith and mental illness and success and failure.
It encompasses life in your 20s for many people….when you become a LEGIT grown up and how you deal with all the grown up shit that life starts hurtling at you. Some things are minor like paying your utility bills and some things are major like getting professional help when you are struggling.
There are long emails between two girlfriends—Alice and Eileen—that tended to go on and on about the most random things—mostly what is going in their lives, like relationships and jobs and what not, but also about deep important issues like faith or politics or social injustices.
At times, I felt like they were giving scholastic lectures to a college class …but I guess that is what a lot of us DO in our 20s. We think we have these huge, important, world changing thoughts and feelings… and we think we know ALL THE THINGS EVER TO KNOW. 😆
Since they are in their 20s, there is quite a lot of sex happening in this story as well.
For me, the sex scenes felt….OFF.
Not quite sure how to explain it.
Maybe back to the whole uncomfortable and unlikeable feeling….IDK.
There were LOTS of them too.
But….
Here’s the thing.
After the first 1/3 of the book, even with all the “off-ness” or discomfort or whatever, I started to kinda LIKE the story. I settled into that odd, unsettled type of feeling and got into the storyline.
So I think this was a likeable unlikeable story 😆
If that sounds cool to you, than definitely check it out.
(Also, the author is Irish and the audiobook narrator is also Irish….so that did contribute to the enjoyment level as well)