Review by alicroz34 - Normal People

alicroz34 's review for:

Normal People by Sally Rooney

4.25

dark emotional sad medium-paced

It's a bit wild to me that people get so incensed over quotation marks. There's something in the style that makes it feel natural and it always feels clear. Leave Sally aloooone let her live her grammatically experimental liiiiiife.

Quotes I liked:

He presses his hands down slightly further into his pockets, as if trying to store his entire body in his pockets, all at once.

Denise decided a long time ago that it is acceptable for men to use aggression toward Marianne as a way of expressing themselves. As a child Marianne resisted, but now she simply detaches, as if it isn't of any interest to her, which in a way it isn't. Denise considers this a symptom of her daughter's frigid and unlovable personality. She believes Marianne lacks "warmth," by which she means the ability to beg for love from people who hate her.

Still, Connell went home that night and read over some notes he had been making for a new story, and he felt the old beat of pleasure inside his body, like watching a perfect goal, like the wrestling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.

Not for the first time, Marianne thinks cruelty does not only hurt the victim, but the perpetrator also, and maybe more deeply and more permanently. You learn nothing very profound about yourself simply by being bullied; but by bullying someone else you learn something you can never forget.

Of course it didn't make sense to write on his Facebook wall, but nothing else made sense either. If people appeared to behave pointlessly in grief, it was only because human life was pointless, and this was the truth that grief revealed.

Content Warnings