Despite the fascinating dialogue and familiar thrill of reading, Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where are you is arguably the most demanding book for a rising star in European literature.
Even in the rapidly changing age of the Internet, many people can't help but wonder: Did Sally Rooney really debut in the literary world four years ago?
ChatBook (2017) is a black comedy created by Dublin millennials that became a hit with the new book.
But compared to the later cross-class teen romance novel "Normal People" (2019), the popularity of the previous work is just a starter.
With even Sally Rooney's schooling, one will argue about the extent to which these books reflect or betray the author's professed Status as a Marxismist, and one may forget (though her critics never will, on the contrary, her critics will never forget) how purely and directly Rooney enjoyed reading. Of course, this is not what Will Selff put it, that "Normal Man" stands for "something very simple, without literary ambitions."
Rooney's publisher also previously opened a pop-up store as a marketing campaign for her new book.
Sally Rooney is only 30 years old today, and her fame seems magical over the years. In a sense, The Beautiful World, Where Are You presents Sally Rooney's reflections on her recent experiences.
I don't know if you can see it, but it seems to me that her third book is the first book she wrote with great anticipation
Sure, there's familiar fun here, but it's no longer the kind of stuff about pure emotion; a bit like Sally Rooney, which I personally feel confuses Sally Rooney's fans and demotes its critics. All of its poignant introspective focus seems to come from judgments about the internet's darkest kernel and has nothing to do with Rooney's self-censorship.
The book centers on the relationship between the well-known writer Alice and her old college friend Irene, both 30 years old.
Exhausted after an unfortunate time in New York, Alice felt that she had "only two good ideas" (there are many in fact) and decided not to write another book, not only because she hated the whims of booksellers marketing hype and the aggression of the media on her life, but also because she felt that writing fiction not only felt "vulgar, decadent, and even cognitively violent" when humanity should reallocate global resources and transform into a sustainable economic model.
These ironic ideas provide an unsettling backdrop for the main plot of the novel, the story of the love quadrifolia similar to Chat History.
In the novel, Irene is employed by a Dublin literary magazine, and her teenage sweetheart is political adviser Simon, while Alice, who now lives by the Mayo Sea, falls in love with felix, a warehouse worker, the object of her hookup on Tinder. Their short, pin-to-needle conversations with each other are arguably the highlight of Sally Rooney's novels.
For example, the following paragraph:
"She has a Wikipedia page," someone whispered at the party, searching for Alice's name.
"You may have written it yourself." Felix said.
"No, it's because of those books." Alice choked back.
But this is not a sequel to Normal Man, and looking at the first in a series of meaningful e-mails between Irene and Alice, Alice "has recently been thinking about right-wing politics (modern people who are not), and conservatism (and its social influence) is beginning to be associated with greedy market capitalism"; other topics to discuss include "whether humanity lost its instinct to appreciate beauty in 1976" and whether "there was an ideological error in the system of production of literary works".
These are very sincere—"I wish I could read good sex theories," Alice says in the novel—and anyone who fanatically chases Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones (the male and female protagonists in the film "Normal People") is likely to start craving less theory and a little more discussion about whether they will be together or not.
In fact, the novel begins with a somewhat dull discussion, only after Alice invites Felix to Rome for her new Italian book launch (in which Alice jokingly says, "I can pay for anything."). I'm rich and famous, remember? "), the story is wonderful;
Felix is actually the central character in all of the best moments in the novel, especially when Erin and Simon finally come to see Alice for the first time after she has returned to Ireland. As a natural spoiler, he unearthed deeply buried grudges ("If they're all such good friends, why not come and see her sooner?"). "Felix is like which pot does not open which pot). And his appearance in the book also provides a lot of crying and laughing juxtaposition, giving the novel a little bit of black humor in many places: "Between 8 p.m. and midnight, he drank a full six pints of Danish beer." Alice washed up after dinner and read an article about Anne Hénor online. ”
The engine of Rooney's novels is essentially epistolary and actually more focused on text messages than letters, producing dramatic satire in the form of unsent drafts and contradictory replies to different recipients. But the trick isn't meant to create jokes: There's a strange and poignant moment in the novel where Erin searches the Internet for her name at work but quickly closes the page, as if seeking proof of her existence. Obviously, we can't be sure what she's doing, because even Rooney wouldn't give herself the privilege of knowing.
In ChatBooks, the novel unfolds in the first person, while in Normal Man the novel takes a more intimate third-person perspective on the protagonist (you can observe Cornell and Marianne's actions and understand their thoughts), but in this novel the narrator and the characters keep their distance, and she and the rest of us speculate: "Is he thinking about her, or something else, someone else?" And also...... Was Alice thinking of him? Did he exist for her in that moment, and if so, in what way? ”
Is this Way Rooney Shrugged Off the "Millennial Spokesperson" label? We don't know about that,
But at least, it was her most self-consciously embarrassing book to date. In the novel, Alice worries that the novel, a literary work itself, relies on us to forget "the cruel exploitation of most human beings by modern society", in which case it unconsciously prevents Rooney's talent for emotional resonance, and thus makes the reader wary when reading.
It's like McDonald's insisting on watching a slaughterhouse video of someone who is eating a Big Mac.
Rooney's witty entanglement of self-pleasure seems to imply that she is not content to express what she wants to express as a writer, but in fact that is all she can express in the present moment. Will readers who like her care about this?
At the end of the day, it's hard not to feel that her greatest artistic challenge is not to transform romantic comedy for an era of political crisis, but rather a simpler task, if not slightly less tricky, but to continue her work.
Editor: LIT.CAVE Studios
Source: The Guardian