“Are they standing in the last lighted room before darkness, bearing witness to something?
Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?”
Introduction
Book’s Name - Beautiful world where are you
Author’s Name - Sally Rooney
Genre - Literary Fiction
Language - English
Synopsis (No Spoilers!)
This is a story about four people who are in their late twenties, trying to find meaning in a troubled world and finding answers to questions about the world. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are young - but life is catching up with them.
They desire each other, they delude each other, they worry about each other, they worry about sex and friendship and the world they live in. They are on a journey to finding a beautiful world if there is one.
About the Author
Sally Rooney was born in 1991 and lives in Dublin, where she graduated from Trinity College. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Dublin Review, The White Review, The Stinging Fly, and the Winter Pages anthology.
About the Book
The story centers on four characters: two closest friends and the two guys with whom they are experimenting with hesitant new romantic relationships. Alice Kelleher is a tremendously successful Irish novelist who has rented an isolated, "chaotically massive" old rectory three hours from Dublin on the fringes of a coastal town where she knows no one after suffering a mental breakdown.
Felix Brady, a local guy she meets on an unlucky first date after connecting on Tinder, has made a mess of his life and now works at a major shipping warehouse, which he dislikes. Alice asks Felix to travel to Rome with her. We then follow their journey as their relationship progresses through different stages.
Parallelly, Eileen Lydon, a hyper-intellectual, absurdly low-paid editorial assistant at a Dublin literary newspaper, spends her days putting missing periods between W. H. Auden's initials. She finds solace from a terrible breakup in the company of her longest friend, Simon Costigan, a parliamentary assistant who has casually dated a number of much younger women over the years.
Simon has been a bright spot in her often-dark life since childhood, and she doesn't want to risk losing his dedicated friendship for a potentially disastrous committed relationship.
The story is seen through three points of view, Alice’s, Eileen’s and through a bunch of emails exchanged between these two best friends. I find these emails to be the highlight of this book. We see the characters’ raw thoughts and views about the world and life.
“I want to live differently, or if necessary to die so that other people can one day live differently.”
They discuss everything from capitalism to climate anxiety, from love to fame, from friendship to life, as best friends do. These letters really capture the essence of what it’s like to be a young adult in today’s world. This book talks about what it is like to be a successful author and the harsh truths about the publishing world.
Rooney tends to talk a lot about Marxism in her novels, and this book is no different. This book discusses Marxist and socialist ideas in the most natural way. This book finds a great way to integrate a way to talk about these ideas in the most natural and easy way so the reader feels invested and also makes you think.
We have conversations about what life is all about. Is it about the big conversations that we have about the world and our place in it? Or is it about the people we love and what we can do to show them our love? At the end of the day, the people we love are what we come back to, they are the most integral part of our lives.
“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 could be doing.”
In Spite of these intellectual conversations that these characters have, they are not perfect. They say the wrong things, they do the wrong things, they are constantly making bad decisions. This is what I admire a lot about these characters, they are real.
They are not some godly creatures who are perfect and trying to teach us a lesson at the end of the story. They are like you and me, they are just trying to go through life worrying a little less about stuff.
One of my favorite excerpts from the book which perfectly captures the writing style and essence of the book is;
“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 could be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganizing the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worried about sex and friendship instead.Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other.”
My ratings for the book - 5 on 5
Get your copy on Amazon
Written By - Kritika Sharma
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