Book Review | Sally Rooney became a superhero in literature, and her latest novel deals with the dark side of success

Novel

Sally Rooney: Beautiful World, Where Are You. Finland Cristina Sandu. Big Dipper. 313 s.

What happens when a young writer suddenly becomes rich and famous, loved and hated?

An Irish writer Sally Rooneyn, 30, in the third novel, an unsolicited and unexpectedly celebrity derails the life of the protagonist.

It’s hard not to read a novel about the superficiality of the literary world and the curses of success in relation to Rooney’s own public image.

“Why do so many hate Sally Rooney?” He wonders Independent. “About the cult of Sally Rooney,” he writes Vox and asks in the headline, “How did reading Sally Rooney become a status symbol?” If Google writes “Is Sally Rooney” the search engine completes the question “a marxist?” (Answer: Yes, he is talked a lot Marxism in interviews and how to try to bring to the literature, for example, the themes of class and the distribution of capital.)

Rooney’s two previous novels Normal people (2018, 2020) and Conversations between friends (2017, Finnish 2019) have become international phenomena, celebrities’ Instagram favorites and adaptations on television.

“Besides, what is the relationship of a famous author to his famous books? … And what good is it for books to be attached to me, my face, my habits, in all their depressing precision? Nothing. So why, why is this happening? ”

This is how Alice, the second protagonist of the book, thinks of an approaching author of thirty, whose two previous novels have been internationally successful works. After a nervous breakdown, he retreats to the Irish countryside and meets Felix, who works in a warehouse. Alice is fascinated by the man’s contemptuous attitude.

In Dublin, his best friend Eileen, meanwhile, tries to recover from the divorce and longs for Simon, a man he has known since he was a child. Eileen is a literary magazine editor with a lousy annual income and therefore wouldn’t always be able to listen to Alice’s privileged appeal of her success.

Like Even in Rooney’s previous novels, the protagonists are beautiful, intelligent, and sensitive, broken millennials in a broken world.

Eileen and Alice seem to be almost the same person. They are acquainted with the university and both live in the world of literature. They think the world has become ugly and the end of civilization looms.

In their correspondence, they wonder if there is anything relevant left in the “last illuminated room before the darkness of the end of the world”. Why love? Why write novels? Where is God in all this?

Social and individual entanglement has been Rooney’s strengths. In this novel, too, he puts into pain the points of pain and the existential crisis of his own generation, although there is nothing new in the remarks per se. They also remain largely the themes of correspondence.

In the case of Alice, however, one of the interesting ideas in the work is also lived through: how empty success he feels. Does literature have political or moral weight if people are only interested in the factors behind the novels?

Books have become status symbols, and literary culture is a mirror of superficial and complacent people: “…

Rooney’s work also touches a small part of the current cultural climate regarding wrongdoing, remorse, and forgiveness:

“But what should people who have done horrible things in their past really do? Spontaneously advertise your own sins to prevent-public disclosure? … Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think there are any people who have done really bad things, ”Alice writes to Eileen after Felix confesses her old sins.

Above all Still, Rooney’s work is once again an entertaining and touching love novel that explores the relationships between people, intimacy, and the risks associated with love with rare precision.

As usual, he also masters the naturally flowing form of dialogue, from which the reader can perceive what is left unsaid and why. Translating these dialogues into Finnish should be challenging.

In the case of young adult hit books, the Finnish translation is important because their potential audience also quickly devours the work in the original language. Rooney’s two previous works have been translated into Finnish Kaijamari Sivill, while The beautiful world where you are novel has been translated by the author Cristina Sandu.

The translation was successful. For example, Sandu’s decision to write the personal pronouns of the dialogues in the colloquial “I” format instead of the colloquial “me” format, unlike previous Rooney translations, makes the whole thing smoother in my opinion.

The beautiful world where you are is a nobility of reading novels, because Rooney is a visionary writer who manages to tune a tension between his characters that petrifies in just the right way.

Still, I’m not completely dazzled. Perhaps it is because of the way the letter form seeking essay clarifies things while watering down the narrative. In a sense of insignificance and the kindness of the world, piezaration puts a kind of zeitgeist into words, but offers nothing very fresh and insightful.