Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney 👫🏻
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Beautiful World, Where Are You opens with Alice, a novelist, meeting Felix, a warehouse worker. She asks him if he wants to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break up and slips back into flirting with her childhood best friend, Simon. In this beautiful world, Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon navigate sex, friendship, relationships and the intricacies and complexities of the world they live in.
“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 if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying 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.”
I think Sally Rooney is incapable of writing a bad book and I’d go as far as to say that this is her best one yet, although I don’t know if that’s just the high I was feeling talking once I finished it. For fans of Sally Rooney’s earlier work, you won’t be disappointed. It’s a mix of both Normal People and Conversations with Friends whilst simultaneously feeling like a more mature piece of work.
“At times I think of human relationships as something soft like sand or water, and by pouring them into particular vessels we give them shape. So a mother’s relationship with her daughter is poured into a vessel marked ‘mother and child’, and the relationship takes the contours of its container and is held inside there, for better or worse. Maybe some unhappy friends would have been perfectly contented as sisters, or married couples as parents and children, who knows. But what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind? Just to put the water out and let it fall.”
One of my favourite things about Rooney’s novels, and what I found especially fascinating about this one in particular, is her characters, the dynamics and interactions between them and other people, and the way they behave and are characterised. All of her characters in this one, Alice, Eileen, Felix, Simon, they all felt so real and authentic, even if that meant they were a little unlikeable at times (I’m looking at you Felix.) But is it a Sally Rooney if the characters don’t rub you the wrong way at times?
“If God wanted me to give you up, he wouldn’t have made who I am”
Overall, Beautiful World, Where Are You is truly a beautiful work. I love the characters she creates and I love watching them interact and love and hurt and grow and prosper and succeed and thrive. The experience of reading this was really enjoyable.
“I was tired, it was late, I was sitting half-asleep in the back of a taxi, remembering strangely that where I go, you are with me, and so is he, and that as long as you both live the world will be beautiful to me.”
