Beautiful World, Where Are You
Beautiful World, Where Are You is 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 childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young―but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
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Beautiful World, Where Are You?
What’s it about?
Alice is a 29-year-old novelist who is struggling to come to terms with both her new found success and her personal life. This book follows her new romantic relationship with Felix, and her older friendships with Eileen and Simon.
What did it make me think about?
I am so glad I am not a young adult now. The earnestness, overthinking, guilt, anxiety, and judgment would be hard to manage. “For me it feels like I am looking down and seeing for the first time that I’m standing on a minuscule ledge at a dizzying height, and the only thing supporting my weight is the misery and degradation of almost everyone else on earth. And I alway end up thinking: I don’t even want to be up here. I don’t need all these cheap clothes and imported foods and plastic containers, I don’t even think they improve my life. They just create waste and make me unhappy anyway. (Not that I’m comparing my dissatisfaction to the misery of actually oppressed peoples, I just mean that the lifestyle they sustain for us is not even satisfying, in my opinion.)
Should I read it?
Well…. It is an interesting book with lots of thought provoking ideas- and I am glad I read it. I understand that Sally Rooney does not speak for every 29 year-old out there, but she does seem able to express the angst that some of her generation must be feeling. I found it interesting that her female characters had such strong global empathy, and yet struggled so much in their actual relationships… I personally did not find the characters all that compelling, or their viewpoints sustainable, but it certainly broadens my understanding. This book gets 8 stars for being enlightening- not for being entertaining.
Quote-
“I looked at the internet for too long today and started feeling depressed. The worst thing is that I actually think people on there are generally well meaning and the impulses are right, but our political vocabulary has decayed so deeply and rapidly since the twentieth century that most attempts to make sense of our present historical moments turn out to be essentially gibberish. Everyone is at once hysterically attached to particular identity categories and completely unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how they came about, and what purposes they serve. The only apparent scheme is that for every victim group (people born into poor families, women, people of colour) there is an oppressor group (people born into rich families, men, white people). But in this framework, relations between victims and oppressor are not historical so much as theological, in that victims are transcendently good and the oppressors are personally evil. For this reason, an individual’s membership of a particular identity group is a question of unsurpassed ethical significance, and a great amount of our discourse is devoted to sorting individuals into their proper groups, which is to say, giving them their proper moral reckoning.”
Beautiful World, Where Are You?
What’s it about?
Alice is a 29-year-old novelist who is struggling to come to terms with both her new found success and her personal life. This book follows her new romantic relationship with Felix, and her older friendships with Eileen and Simon.
What did it make me think about?
I am so glad I am not a young adult now. The earnestness, overthinking, guilt, anxiety, and judgment would be hard to manage. “For me it feels like I am looking down and seeing for the first time that I’m standing on a minuscule ledge at a dizzying height, and the only thing supporting my weight is the misery and degradation of almost everyone else on earth. And I alway end up thinking: I don’t even want to be up here. I don’t need all these cheap clothes and imported foods and plastic containers, I don’t even think they improve my life. They just create waste and make me unhappy anyway. (Not that I’m comparing my dissatisfaction to the misery of actually oppressed peoples, I just mean that the lifestyle they sustain for us is not even satisfying, in my opinion.)
Should I read it?
Well…. It is an interesting book with lots of thought provoking ideas- and I am glad I read it. I understand that Sally Rooney does not speak for every 29 year-old out there, but she does seem able to express the angst that some of her generation must be feeling. I found it interesting that her female characters had such strong global empathy, and yet struggled so much in their actual relationships… I personally did not find the characters all that compelling, or their viewpoints sustainable, but it certainly broadens my understanding. This book gets 8 stars for being enlightening- not for being entertaining.
Quote-
“I looked at the internet for too long today and started feeling depressed. The worst thing is that I actually think people on there are generally well meaning and the impulses are right, but our political vocabulary has decayed so deeply and rapidly since the twentieth century that most attempts to make sense of our present historical moments turn out to be essentially gibberish. Everyone is at once hysterically attached to particular identity categories and completely unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how they came about, and what purposes they serve. The only apparent scheme is that for every victim group (people born into poor families, women, people of colour) there is an oppressor group (people born into rich families, men, white people). But in this framework, relations between victims and oppressor are not historical so much as theological, in that victims are transcendently good and the oppressors are personally evil. For this reason, an individual’s membership of a particular identity group is a question of unsurpassed ethical significance, and a great amount of our discourse is devoted to sorting individuals into their proper groups, which is to say, giving them their proper moral reckoning.”
i almost wanted to rate this book 4 stars because i found the 2nd half to be very peaceful ? but i was so bored the entire first half, i just don’t think that can be forgotten
Such a quality easy read -- a great meditation on what's worth living for in our modern societal decline
I don't know what it is about Sally Rooney and her books. When I think about Beautiful World, Where Are You objectively, it doesn't seem like something I'd enjoy, yet I did—and it is even my favorite book by her. If you haven't read any of her contemporary fiction before, I would say that she is one of those authors you might need to develop an acquired taste for. Her books are character driven, rather than plot heavy, and that can be very offputting for some. This one is about 4 characters navigating life in their early 30s. They are outright obnoxious and pretentious yet weirdly fascinating, and nothing really significant happens to them, but there is just something about Rooney's writing that enthralls me.
While I preferred her other books, this one still had the deep relationships and incisive commentary of a typical Sally Rooney novel. The end was a bit of a let down but overall still an enjoyable read
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