Beautiful World, Where Are You

A Novel

No cover

Sally Rooney: Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

English language

Published April 18, 2021 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

ISBN:
978-0-374-60261-1
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4 stars (38 reviews)

Beautiful World, Where Are You is a novel by Irish author Sally Rooney. It was released on 7 September 2021. The book was a New York Times and IndieBound bestseller.

11 editions

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 …

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 …

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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