title: Beautiful World, Where Are You by: Rooney, Sally published: 2021-09-07 read: 2023-07 preview

Alice, Eileen, Felix, Simon.   These four people are central to this book, and their who with whom.  It is mostly, but not completely, written in the form of letters between Alice and Eileen, and that allows you to have different views on the things that happened.  Or did not happen, in many cases.

As the book comments on itself, in a way, in an email from Alice to Eileen:

“The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth. To confront the poverty and misery in which millions of people are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the lives of the ‘main characters’ of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful. Who can care, in short, what happens to the novel’s protagonists, when it’s happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species? Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter? So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world – packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text. And we can care once again, as we do in real life, whether people break up or stay together – if, and only if, we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that, i.e. everything.”

Rooney wrote a book about love, in the end.  Did you ever encounter this kind of love?  I think we all did; not knowing for sure, but this back-and-forth, shall we shall we not, is very familiar.  And as in real life, the carnal part plays a good role but is not used as an erotic instrument in the book.  It’s more factual.

A pleasant book.  Not a story I will remember after finishing my thoughts here.