Reviews and Comments

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.

As an author, Sally Rooney (in Normal People), is very much not a typical Author. She doesn't use language to dazzle and flaunt, there are no long-winded poetic descriptions here. She uses language to explain something, arranging sentences in a series reminiscent of how a mathematical proof is constructed.

Maybe more accurate to call her an anthropologist: observing humans, their interactions. For the viewer, she is describing the motivations, the contexts, the individuals thoughts and feelings. And how what follows is nothing but the most natural course of events, given the full context.

She has an ability to and dissect, very subtle emotions and interactions.

He seemed to think Marianne had access to a range of different identities, between which she slipped effortlessly. This suprised 
her, because she usually felt confined inside on single personality, which was always the same regardless of what she did or said. 
She had tried to be different in the past, as a kind of experiment, but it had never worked. 
If she was different with Connell, the difference was not happening inside herself, in her pesonhood, but in between them, in the dynamic.

Or how shifts in context affects feeling of self, after Connell moves from his hometown

Back home, Connel's shyness never seemed like much of an obstacle to his social life, because everyone knew who he was already, and there was never any need to introduce himself or create impressions about his personality. 
If anything, his personality seemed like something extenal to himself, managed by the opinions of others, rather than anything he individually did or produced. 
Now he has a sense of invisibility, nothingness, with no reputation to recommend him to anyone. Though his physical appearance has not changed, he feels objectively worse-looking than he used to be.

Solid Rooney