October 2024 Book, Beautiful World Where Are You?

 

Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at Guilford Free Library at 6:30.

Sally Rooney's third novel in five years takes its title from a line from a poem by Friedrich Schiller, which Schubert set to music in 1819. "Beautiful world, where are you?" is a question her two main female characters, best friends from college now on the cusp of 30, grapple with repeatedly in their struggles to figure out how they should live and find meaning in a troubled world that has become increasingly unviable on multiple levels — ecologically, economically, ethically and emotionally.

Alice and Eileen are best friends, about to turn 30, who agree that human civilisation is facing collapse, beauty is dead, art is commodified and the novel irrelevant as a form. These smart Irish Marxists are best friends from college, and they have lives that are, in very different ways. Alice is an unfeasibly successful young writer and Eileen works for a literary magazine, earning 20 grand a year. The book interleaves their separate love stories with the long emails they send each other, in which they have much to discuss and share.

Rooney looks hard for beauty and — reassuringly — manages to find it. That is part of her considerable appeal. But so is the straightforward sincerity with which she writes about class issues, mental health, and see-saw relationships. Her unembellished prose is rich in conversations that are at once plaintive and wry, soul-baring and deflective.

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