Beautiful World, Where Are You

A Novel

by Sally Rooney, Sally Rooney

hardcover, 240 pages

Published Sept. 7, 2021 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

ISBN:: 978-0-374-60260-4

(38 reviews)

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, 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?

11 editions

geirertzgaard reviewed Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Review of 'Beautiful World, Where Are You' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Det kan godt være at jeg ikke er målgruppen i Sally Rooneys lesekrets, men etter å ha lest Conversations with Friends og Normal People, bøker jeg likte, tror jeg dette ble èn bok for mye med Sally Rooney. Conversations with Friends var hennes første bok, og dermed den friskeste. Man skal heller ikke se vekk fra betydningen av identifikasjonspunkter, og mens Normal People mer kjentes ut som beskrivelsen av en ungdom jeg aldri opplevde (mangel på faktisk ungdomsromantikk), hadde Conversations personer jeg kunne relatere til.
Beautiful world, derimot, opplevdes stort sett bare som trist, en bok som er skrevet på ren vilje, med et persongalleri jeg trodde ville engasjere meg, og som jeg kanskje kjente meg igjen i. Men nei,stilmessig svinger det alt for mye, måten skildringene fremstår, er slik jeg ville skrevet ting på dager jeg ikke er inspirert, hvor setningene ikke kommer flyvende, og avsnittene sammentvungne.
Men det er kanskje slik det er å være i trettiåra og ikke ha landet, landet personer eller landet tilknytninger. Hvis det er slik det er å være Millennial er det langt fra der jeg er, og det virker som den tristeste generasjonen mulig. Kanskje er det derfor folk liker denne boken, men for meg blir det håpløst selvopptatt og .... kan man si knotete? Jeg håper Sally Rooney opplever en epifani før neste skriveprosjekt, for hvis dette er utviklingen i hennes forfatterskap, er jeg usikker på om jeg gidder lese neste bok.

BOOitsnathalie reviewed Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Review of 'Beautiful World, Where Are You' on 'Storygraph'

2 stars

What an exasperating novel! Literally half of it is made up of the most inane, indulgent emails where characters ponder about consumerism and cosmetics and the philosophy of relationships, with zero theoretical background. Literally hundreds of pages of people just saying shower thought nonsense about labor and the exploitation of the global south and being like "idk if that makes sense, I've just been thinking about it." These are the sorts of conversations I have with friends over coffee and they tell me to read a fucking book.

The parts that aren't Wikipedia rehashes are also bizarrely inert. Huge chunks of the book read like alt text (constant plain descriptions of characters opening messaging apps), with almost no character voice because it's written in this detached third person style where everyone is a soup of the author just trying to have a single coherent idea. The back third of the book is the best by a wide margin because the emails go away and characters actually interact, but even that is too little too late because it's coming in with dynamics that are explicitly pulling from decades of friendship we barely see. We're meant to assume these characters are best friends despite only having uncomfortable interactions and bizarre emails. Then - psych - it's COVID time and we're talking about how actually nothing changed and isn't it sad we can't go to the cinema. Just exhausting stuff.

Finally, there are ongoing gestures at queerness which are so fucking obnoxious. Two of the characters are supposedly bisexual but everyone craves the traditional stability of heteronormativity. The book literally ends with a character getting pregnant and talking about marrying her childhood best friend and moving to the country.

This will certainly appeal to a certain type of middle class liberal that fancies themselves progressive but refuses to engage with actual materialist reality. Why consider decades of theory when you can act like you're the first person who has ever thought maybe it's wrong to subjugate much of the world to preserve an expendable lifestyle. Rooney is so transparently trying to come to terms with her own wealth and celebrity and it's just embarrassing.

What a fucking let down after Normal People.

janson reviewed Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Review of 'Beautiful World, Where Are You' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

Perhaps it isn’t fair, so close to Cusk, to think Rachel wrestles with her writerly-ness with more detached but interesting nuance. That said, Rooney posed the questions with empathy and familiarity.

ilchinealach reviewed Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Review of 'Beautiful World, Where Are You' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

wrote about my ambivalence analoguehumanist.wordpress.com/2022/07/25/narrating-beautiful-world-where-are-you/

airdog reviewed Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Tightrope writing

3 stars

Sally Rooney likes to play with fire. She writes an impressive quantity of words about nothing ( what some would call "bird brain" talk) but manages to slip in those incredible insights about life and relationships that keep you wanting more and keep you reading just as you're just about to quit . I'm usually not very tolerant of insignificant chatter but I have to admit that I was hooked in this case. And she achieves that in a very classical structure with an intro, a development and a conclusion.

_astronoMay reviewed Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Review of 'Beautiful World, Where Are You' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

The writing was unique with the lack of real dialogue, but I found it was perfect for the story. The characters felt real and more relatable than I expected. A breath of fresh air that I didn't know I needed.

sarah reviewed Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

the writing! but the characters!

4 stars

I don’t have to like the characters in the books I read (and actually as a former EngLit prof, find that way of reading for likeability or relatedness to be super limiting). But having said that, with every single Rooney novel, I struggle with frustration and wanting to shake the characters, especially the young women. I think this is probably the point of it all? This is gorgeously written, especially the third-person chapters describing the characters’ actions etc and the cinematic looking-at-ness of those sections (she tells you insistently what it looks like the characters are feeling from their actions rather than telling you how they feel). But I still wondered the whole time, as I have with Normal and Conversations, why I was reading it.

peoplelikedogs reviewed Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

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4 stars

Enjoyed this in a pretty indulgent way. I really liked the format alternating between story and email correspondence. FFO philosophical meanderings about love and friendship (me).

GG reviewed Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Review of 'Beautiful World, Where Are You' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

I love the way Sally Rooney describes interactions between characters — she captures their anxieties and little movements in a very realistic way. That’s why it was such a bummer that this novel was so exquisitely boring. There’s almost no plot — just two friends navigating their own complicated relationship with each other and with their respective romantic partners. I rushed through the past 25% just to get it over with. I would have given it only one star if the writing wasn’t so lovely.

Biwa reviewed Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Review of 'Beautiful World, Where Are You' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

I'm fully sold on Sally Rooney's writing and not motivated to look for flaws, just grateful when there's new stuff to read. This one is set in present day and gets texting, dating apps, and phone sex right. This book particularly fascinated me by the way it upended traditional binary gender stereotypes. Men expressed their feelings and opinions with skill and offered to change. Women sometimes self sabotaged and confused matters. The book asks what we can hope for in life (something I'm pondering right now, too).

I enjoyed the seesaw structure of the book, the way it shifted back and forth between the characters' dating lives with each other and the detailed, often philosophical, platonic email exchanges between the two female characters.