Sally Rooney "Beautiful World, Where Are You"

Faber Books, London, 2021

Mark your calendars, bring out the champagne glasses etc because I actually enjoyed a Sally Rooney book. I know, weird, right? Usually, I like to be wooed by beautiful prose and poetic phrasing or at the very least I’d like to read sentences that are more than three words long. I love me some quotation marks, I adore long gorgeous descriptions. 

And yet... Few books have touched me as deeply as this one. I initially borrowed it on Libby, finished it, and since I realised I had highlighted so many passages, had to go and buy myself a physical copy. Now, this rarely happens that I want to buy a book I’ve already read, so that’s the highest praise a book can get from me. 

Beautiful World, Where Are You is about friendship and love, it’s about young people trying to find their place in the world, trying to find some meaning in everything that happens to them, while carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. You know, as they do.

I love that the characters are sort of label-free, they are who they are, they love whom they love, they are not all heterosexual. They are endearing at times and completely irritating at others, just like real people can be. 

The friendships and relationships in this novel are far from perfect or even healthy, but they seem pretty realistic. I mean don’t we all have at least one of those friends we always agree to meet and catch up with and then somehow never do? Don’t we all have that one person we would drop everything for if they just said the word?

There are books you give a five-star rating to immediately after finishing them. And then there are those you are not so sure about, not sure how to rate them at all. Maybe it was a 3, maybe it was a 5, so you settle for 4. But the bloody book won’t stop haunting you and you go back to thinking about it constantly, re-reading passages, and finally you realise that if for some reason it keeps pestering you, then it has to be a five-star read. Even though I’m still not a fan of the author’s short sentences and lack of quotation marks, even though I wasn’t a fan of the long essay-like paragraphs, it’s a five out of five. Because there were some sentences and paragraphs that shook me to my core and I’m not sure I’ll ever recover. (Okay, okay, I’m just trying to be dramatic. Or am I?)

I get why some people don’t like – it’s pretentious at times, the protagonists can be really annoying, and there are some repetitive motives/tropes across Rooney’s novels – and I also get why others obsess over it. I was so ready to not like it because I have a strange relationship with her books, so no one is more surprised than I am. I didn’t like Conversations with Friends, I did like Normal People – still didn’t love it though – but it is a great feeling to let yourself be surprised by authors who haven’t been your favourite in the past. I am very glad I gave Rooney another shot.

Not sure to whom I would recommend it though. I’ve seen reviews that say they loved Sally Rooney’s other books but absolutely hated this one, and vice versa. So, the best I can do is to suggest you try and see for yourself. You can always put it down it you don’t like it after all. Just like I did the first time I opened it. But something told me to give it another go, and it was 100% worth it.

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Maybe certain kind of pain, at certain formative stages in life, just impress themselves into a person’s sense of self permanently. 

So in that sense, there is nothing bigger than what you so derisively call 'breaking up or staying together' (!), because at the end of our lives when there’s nothing left in front of us, it’s still the only thing we want to talk about. Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. 

And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one. 

If I ever do get a hold of you, you won’t need to tell me, he said. I’ll know. But I’m not going to chase too much. I’ll just stay where I am and see if you come to me.

Yes, that’s what hunters do with deer, she said. Before they kill them. 

I should have known it would all get ruined after that, because I was sitting there on your couch thinking to myself, I can’t remember the last time I felt this happy. Any time something really good happens, my life has to fall apart. Maybe it’s me, maybe I’m the one doing it. I don’t know.

For my part, the difference between lockdown and normal life is (depressingly?) minimal. Eighty to ninety per cent of my days are the same as they would be anyway – working from home, reading, avoiding social gatherings.