Beautiful World, Where Are You: a new fav
What a gorgeous gorgeous book.
Alice, a writer, meets Felix, a warehouse worker. They met on Tinder. She went on one brief date with him at a coffee shop, with an awkward termination, or perchance a hidden insecurity of rushing something. Presumed incompatibility. A bit and a while later, they encounter again by chance, and strangely but naturally in the moment, Alice invites Felix to travel to Rome with her. And strangely, he agrees. In this day and age, with so many opportunities to see the world and drink life in, and methods of meeting people and staying connected, and, with remarkable people, this ought to be more normalized. In this story, Alice is only on a work trip and Felix accompanies her, and I would say that Felix is not a pretty face nor an electric soul and instead a very very flawed person, but my point stands.
Alice’s best friend, Eileen, lives in Dublin. She goes through a hollowing breakup, then falls back into flirting with Simon, the boy she grew up with. So this book is about relationships: friendships that end up being long distance, lovers who seem to have a gravitational pull due to stepwise history, and the pent-up crises, what we can’t unsee, what we can’t undo, and what we can’t move past. Whether it means more to be deeply loved or widely liked, and how an obsession with fame is a “deep psychological illness”, with the tapestry of our social fabric promoting such a “disfiguring social disease”. Loving someone unconditionally despite very real flaws and complexes.
Alice writes in her email to Eileen:
But what would it be like to form a relationships with no preordained shape of any kind? Just to pour the water out and let it fall. I suppose it would take no shape, and run off in all directions. That’s a little like myself and Felix, I think. There is no obvious path forward by which any relation between us can proceed. I don’t believe he would describe me as a friend, because he has friends, and the way he relates to them is different … we’re in certain senses closer, because there are no boundaries or conventions by which our relationship is constrained. What makes it different in other words is neither him nor me, nor any special personal qualities pertaining to either of us, nor even the particular combination of our individual personalities, but the method by which we relate to one another — orthe absence of method. Maybe eventually we will just drop out of each other’s lives, or become friends after all, or something else. But whatever happens will at least be the result of this experiment, which feels at times like it’s going badly wrong, and at other times feels like the only kind of relationship worth having.
Sally Rooney’s writing is the most realistic writing that I’ve read. I’ve never related to any of the physical or material attributes of any of her characters, but somehow, I see, feel, and understand them. She captures such depth and wonderful complexity in very uncomplicated language, with very mundane characters. She has a way of writing that signifies struggles many young people are able to grasp. A feeling of desparately wanting, but trying to not look desparate. Judging someone as if up on a hill, when standing at the bottom. The need for emotional availability in a relationship, yet coming in, knowing the limited capacity and boundaries from a tangled mess of the past, and simply wishing we were able to aesthetically brush the mess aside in a simple, pretty, futile gesture.
The uncanny details that she puts into her writing, and the empty conjecturing and spiralling that’s true, dark, but not without merit. I was reading Beautiful World on the balcony on the most gorgeous summer day, and I just thought to myself, this book is so beautiful. Not beautiful in an aesthetic or pleasurable way — as a society, we’ve come to associate beauty with appearances and cosmetics, and some people are so pretty it warps their sense of self — but beauty can exist in problems, not even imperfection being accentuated as a “lack” of perfection, but in the tousled state of imperfection itself. My writing is too ordinary. I’ll quote Sally Rooney.
Walking around, even on a bad day, I would see things — I mean just the things that were in front of me. People’s faces, the weather, traffic. The smell of petrol from the garage, the feeling of being rained on, completely ordinary things. And in that way even the bad days were good, because I felt them and remembered feeling them. There was something delicate about living like that — like I was an instrument and the world touched me and reverberated inside me.
Fast forward to Eileen reading her diary entries (she calls it “the life book”) and reimagining how she felt about the world a few months back.
… Reading the book again now gives me such strange sensations. Was I really like that once? A person capable of dropping town to the most fleeting of impressions, and dilating them somehow, dwelling inside them, and finding riches and beauties there…
And then a while later.
I began to feel it all over again — the nearness, the possibility of beauty, like a light radiating softly from behind the visible world, illuminating everything. As soon as I realised what I was feeling, I tried to move toward it in my thoughts, to reach out and handle it, but it only cooled a little or shrank away from me, or slipped off further ahead.
Sally Rooney’s sentences are so fluid. Bypassing the verbose and abstract. They dip past another and ebb and flow. Some are short but they layer on, with sufficient pacing, sufficient depth. She captures dialogue beautifully, and the dialogue never feels performative. Characters are developed through their actions, but the dialogue is pleasing to watch unfold and take in. Dialogue is done without quotation marks, but it’s clear as day and night who’s voice is speaking at a time. Text messages too.
She writes Beautiful World almost in glitching frames. Sometimes the phone camera takes a blurry snapshot of what’s going on, and other times, the camera skips segments — weddings, conversations, sex — important or not, to the next stage, with its aftermath laid out. The feelings, tensions, and reflections paint a silhouette of what had freshly happened. The book is chaptered so cleanly — each chapter being an email from Alice to Eileen, sandwiched by a moving shot of Alice’s life, followed by an email from Eileen to Alice, sandwiched by a moving shot of Eileen’s life. There was never a need to specify who was addressing who, or whose life it was. Like the dialogue, this just emerged as a rhythm.
I stumbled upon ‘The Party’ by Maisie Peters and this song. “your chaos and your crooked in a heartbeat.” Alice would take Felix’s chaos and his crooked in a heartbeat. I’ll take your chaos and your crooked in a heartbeat.
To parallel more of her writing to music, her writing reminds me of Gracie Abrams’ songs. If I chose a few, ‘Best’, ‘I know it won’t work’, and ‘Difficult’ would be on the setlist. Burning determination, futile efforts, clean boundaries, warped emotions.
