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livvywivvy 's review for:
Beautiful World, Where Are You
by Sally Rooney
Don't like the title but LOVED this book!
No one writes realistic characters like Sally Rooney. It feels like I know these people, their opinions, their flaws; it gets me every time. A seriously talented writer! No fluff, just the raw complexities of being human, and being flawed.
I was fully expecting not to like this book but I am so pleased! I loved the philosophical questions posed, and I loved how the emails sent between two friends were used to convey and question so much, from climate anxiety to religion to class commentary, I WAS EATING IT ALL UP! I saw so many different aspects of myself in the characters, and related to almost everything they were feeling anxious about. Not sure what that says about myself, but I'm taking that I'm not alone in my feeling of pure despair for the sad, capitalistic hell we live in (lol). My only criticism is that it was awkward between Alice and Felix at times but I think that was intentional so it's not really a criticism. I was feeling exactly the way Rooney intended me to feel whilst reading! Again, pure craftsmanship! I don't have much else to say - rare for me.
Honestly, after reading Intermezzo and Normal People, this is probably my favourite from Rooney. I enjoyed the others but this was just so much better. Need to go back and change my ratings brb...
Quotes I liked (I had so many lol):
-'I've been thinking lately about right-wing politics, and how it is that conservatism came to be associated with rapacious market capitalism. The connection is not obvious, at least to me, since markets preserve nothing, but ingest all aspects of an existing social landscape and excrete them, shorn of meaning and memory, as transactions. What could be 'conservative' about such a process?'
-'The present has become discontinuous. Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content.'
-'I tell myself that I want to live a happy life, and that the circumstances for happiness just haven't arisen. But what if that's not true? What if I'm the one who can't let myself be happy? Because I'm scared, or I prefer to wallow in self-pitty, or I don't believe I deserve good things, or some other reason.'
No one writes realistic characters like Sally Rooney. It feels like I know these people, their opinions, their flaws; it gets me every time. A seriously talented writer! No fluff, just the raw complexities of being human, and being flawed.
I was fully expecting not to like this book but I am so pleased! I loved the philosophical questions posed, and I loved how the emails sent between two friends were used to convey and question so much, from climate anxiety to religion to class commentary, I WAS EATING IT ALL UP! I saw so many different aspects of myself in the characters, and related to almost everything they were feeling anxious about. Not sure what that says about myself, but I'm taking that I'm not alone in my feeling of pure despair for the sad, capitalistic hell we live in (lol). My only criticism is that it was awkward between Alice and Felix at times but I think that was intentional so it's not really a criticism. I was feeling exactly the way Rooney intended me to feel whilst reading! Again, pure craftsmanship! I don't have much else to say - rare for me.
Honestly, after reading Intermezzo and Normal People, this is probably my favourite from Rooney. I enjoyed the others but this was just so much better. Need to go back and change my ratings brb...
Quotes I liked (I had so many lol):
-'I've been thinking lately about right-wing politics, and how it is that conservatism came to be associated with rapacious market capitalism. The connection is not obvious, at least to me, since markets preserve nothing, but ingest all aspects of an existing social landscape and excrete them, shorn of meaning and memory, as transactions. What could be 'conservative' about such a process?'
-'The present has become discontinuous. Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content.'
-'I tell myself that I want to live a happy life, and that the circumstances for happiness just haven't arisen. But what if that's not true? What if I'm the one who can't let myself be happy? Because I'm scared, or I prefer to wallow in self-pitty, or I don't believe I deserve good things, or some other reason.'