holiman reviewed Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
Experimental Rooney
3 stars
In BFWAU, Sally Rooney uses a different mode of writing. She has abandoned the omniscient point of view, and instead tells the story in two different points of view, the camera-view, and the correspondance-view.
In the camera-view, the narrative is reminiscent of a manuscript; text which describes what happens before the camera, but lacking any details about the internals of anything. This narrative is intentionally a bit detached: in the early pages I felt that she was reluctant to even share the names of the protagonists. "A woman sat in a hotel bar", we learn in the first sentence. Later on, "At eight minutes past seven, a man entered through the door".
This distance she is creating, is at some points even further exacerbated when she brings attention to the fact that she is not omniscient -- "breaking the fifth wall" -- by posing direct questions from narrator …
In BFWAU, Sally Rooney uses a different mode of writing. She has abandoned the omniscient point of view, and instead tells the story in two different points of view, the camera-view, and the correspondance-view.
In the camera-view, the narrative is reminiscent of a manuscript; text which describes what happens before the camera, but lacking any details about the internals of anything. This narrative is intentionally a bit detached: in the early pages I felt that she was reluctant to even share the names of the protagonists. "A woman sat in a hotel bar", we learn in the first sentence. Later on, "At eight minutes past seven, a man entered through the door".
This distance she is creating, is at some points even further exacerbated when she brings attention to the fact that she is not omniscient -- "breaking the fifth wall" -- by posing direct questions from narrator to reader:
Felix is attending a book-reading Alice is doing.
Alice answered questions about feminism, sexuality, the role of the Catholic Church in Irish cultural life. Did Felix find her answers interesting, or wa he bored? Was he thinking about her, or about something else, someone else? And onstage, speaking about her books, was Alice thinking about him? Did he exist for her in that moment, and if so, in what way?
That paragraph feels to me very much like a book-club discussion agenda. It totally breaks any sense of immersion that I had up until then.
I find this point of view to be a bit both frustrating in it's detachment. Also I find it a bit superfluous and verbose, since it just relates exteriors, in a somewhat deadpan fashion. Previously, when reading Rooney, I always found her prose rather succinct.
The second narrative technique is emails between the two main protagonists. These are pretty long-winded letters, observations about life, existence, sex, relationships, humanity, the arts etc. While interesting, they do not really manage to lift the book. And, lots of complicated relationships, and lots of detailed sex.
I see this as Sally Rooney's experimental book, where she explores different ways to narrate a story. I personally feel that this was not a very successfull experiment, but her being such a competent author, even her failures are better than many other books.
