A review by bookish_5280
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

adventurous emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Sally Rooney has done it once again! I enjoyed Beautiful World, Where Are You even more than her other two novels, just because she was able to keep her incredible style and observations but redirected them to conversations around politics and beauty (and, of course, relationships). I loved the way that she used the emails between Alice and Eileen as a literary device--it provided a kind of break from the main plot, as well as allowing for a space for stunning, soulful meditations on the way that we take in beauty or aesthetics. 

The streets were quiet and dark, and the air was oddly warm and still, and on the quays the office buildings were all lit up inside, and empty, and underneath everything, beneath the surface of everything, I began to feel it all over again--the nearness, the possibility of beauty, like a light radiating softly from behind the visible world, illuminating everything.

As with the other two books, personal relationships play a crucial role in the development of the plot and the general ideas discussed in the novel. I love the way that Rooney developed two full subplots/stories (Eileen and Simon, Alice and Felix), and then blended them into one cohesive narrative with stunningly real emotions, situations, and finally, a hopeful end. 

I was [...] remembering strangely that wherever 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.

I also really appreciated the way that Rooney approaches climate change and other political/environmental issues, as well as religion. These are always a central topic because of Simon, and so the discussion around them never felt forced or didactic. Instead, because the characters themselves were constantly thinking about these topics, I felt like I was listening in on a friendly conversation or an internal dialogue--a very engaging way to look at topics that become more and more important as time goes on (in a personal as well as a societal sense). As a person who is not very optimistic about the future of human civilization, Chapter 30 hit home. I loved how Sally Rooney talked about having children in a world of uncertainty:

... I mean children are coming anyway, and in the grand scheme of things it won't matter much whether any of them are mine or his. We have to try either way to build a world they can live in.

Eileen says that having an abortion not because she doesn't want the child, but because she is afraid of climate change, would be "a way of mutilating my real life as a gesture of submission to an imagined future."  I think these kinds of discussions are critically important for us (Gen Z, millennials, etc.) to begin to form a functional path to move forward in a world that is fundamentally falling apart.

Of course, as in all of Rooney's work, there are all the little phrases that are unexpected and beautiful:

All of life knotted into this house for the night, like a necklace knotted at the bottom of a drawer.

One of my favorite emails in the whole novel was from Alice to Eileen, in which they are discussing the relationship between love, fulfilment, and the inspiration to write or to create:

In a way, it [writing] was like a love affair, or an infatuation, except that it only involved myself and it was all within my own control. [...] It was like God put his hand to my head and filled me with the most intense desire I have ever felt, not the desire for another person, but desire to bring something into being that had never existed before.

Rooney--thank you for another beautiful, beautiful book. So many things to reflect on, so many stunning quotes and thoughts. And, as always, what an incredible meditation on messy female friendship and the complicated role of trauma in relationships.

"And I think if I believed in God, I wouldn't want to prostrate myself before him and ask for forgiveness. I would just want to thank him every day, for everything."
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