Beautiful World, Where Are You
Ratings225
Average rating3.5
Alice meets Felix and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young - but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?
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no need for the audiobook narrator to actually moan in my ear during the sex scenes but i appreciate the dedication to the job... do they pay you more for doing that?
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1.5 stars
listen... i own 3 Sally Rooney books and i was so very excited to read them all because EVERYONE loves her but after this book i'm kinda hesitant to pick up her other books.
Maybe i shouldn't have started with this book? idk someone please give me motivation to read her other books because my excitement to read them has completely dried up
This book is conflicting... I wouldn't say I quite recommend it, not even sure I liked it, but I was slightly moved in the end. The first three quarters of the book dragged on in a sad philosophical portrait of late 20s early 30s life sorta way. I kept waiting for something to actually happen, and then finally much of the conflict subtlety hinted at during the first part of the book came to surface. It was beautiful in a melancholy way, and even briefly satisfying. Then the book wrapped up with three short conclusion chapters, leaving me a little adrift. I wanted more, but was also relieved to be done...
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.
On finding meaning and beauty in this life that we ourselves are destroying. Touches on topics like capitalism and fame/success, but comes to the idea that maybe life is really just about being with, worrying about, and loving people. And isn't that just so human?
What a beautiful, beautiful book! Chapter 23 will live in my mind forever!
