Name: Vojtech's review of Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
Item: Beautiful World, Where Are You
Rating: 4
Author: Vojtech

Sally Rooney

Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends. Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

A Novel

Beautiful World, Where Are You

Celina Irena Kuhn

If god wanted me to give you Up, He wouldn't have made me who I am.

Elise Rosa Cornelis

These hands touching you now, I use them to pack boxes?

Because in my deepest essence I am just an artefact of our culture.

We hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good

Her beauty is something I have to search for, requiring some interpretive work, some intellectual or abstract work.

Like I was an instrument and the whole world touched me and reverberated inside me

What if the meaning of life remains the same always - just to live and be with other people?

It's better to be deeply loved than widely liked.

But what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind?

Maybe unhappy friends would have been perfectly contented as sisters, or married couples as parents and children, who knows. 

Alice, am I going to have to live in the real world one day?

Jesus no, absolutely not. Who told you that?

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a breakup, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.

Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

Gemma McCarthy

He gave a short laugh and said: No. Do you? 

Yeah? he said. What do you be crying about? 

Anything, really. I suppose I'm very unhappy. 

He looked at her. Seriously? he said. Why? 

Nothing specific. It's just how I feel. I find my life difficult.

He carried her boxes of books from the back of his car and said proudly: The weight of your brain.

Vojtech

I guess you could say the old ways of being together were wrong — they were! — and that we didn't want to repeat old mistakes — we didn't. But when we tore down what confined us, what did we have in mind to replace it? […] What do we have now? Instead? Nothing. And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.

Macy HB

It makes me think about the first day I ever saw you, and I remember the knitted green cardigan I was wearing, and the hairband you had in your hair. I mean the life we’ve had since then, together and not together - whether it was already there with us that day.

And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person?

It's hard to go very far up in Dublin or very low down, hard to lose yourself or other people, or to gain a sense of perspective. You might think it's a democratic way to organise a city -so that everything happens face to face, I mean, on equal footing. True, no one is looking down on you all from a height. But it gives the sky a position of total dominance. Nowhere is the sky meaningfully punctuated or broke up by anything at all. 

Download the first chapter of a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends. Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

Beautiful World, Where Are You Chapter Sampler

Margarida Santos

And yet the only recommended treatment for stress is not to experience it in the first place. It's not like anxiety or depression, where you can go to your doctor and get treated and hopefully experience some degree of symptomatic improvement. It's like taking illegal drugs - you're just not supposed to do it, and if you do, you should try to do it less. There is no available medication to treat the problem, and no therapeutic regime backed by any real evidence. Just don't get stressed! It's very important, or you could make yourself really Sick!! 

And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.

Maybe we're just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be Joing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn't it in a waya nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you an imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And i love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other

Raising his eyebrows, Gary said: Paying rent doesn't make you working cdass.

 Yeah, working doesn't make you working class. Spending half your pay cheque on rent, not owning any property, getting exploited by your boss, none of it makes you working class, right? So what does, having a certain accent, is it? 

With an irritated laugh he answered: Do you think you can go driving around in your dad's BMW, and then turn around and say you're working class because you don't get along with othe bre your boss ? It's not a fashion, you know. It's an identity. 

Whether someone is a guy or a girl. I know for most people it's like, the one big thing they really do care about. But for me, it just doesn't make any difference.

𝓬𝓱𝓮𝓻𝓲𝓮

But if you think there’s any chance that I could make you happy, I wish you would let me try. Because it’s the only thing I really want to do with my life.

arth

** spoiler alert **
           For someone who loves to read good prose and beautifully articulated words, I'm so in love with how Sally Rooney writes her book. It's undeniably outstanding and her thoughts on some things are thought provoking. But departing from her Normal People book, Beautiful World, Where Are You was not for me. Though it feels more mature, the complexity of the characters were not as much as interesting. 

If it's intended to exhibits the journey to self acceptance, I don't think it's focus enough on that. Maybe it's the way I feel about her characters that so awkwardly felt all the same throughout, even though she had given each characters a basic introduction, they're just not hitting me and some of their actions frustrated me. Eileen and Simon are basically adults, they are written as intimate but never really talk about their relationship once in a serious tone. I just don't feel connected to them in a sense of lack of depth in their relationships. Then about Alice and Felix that just don't fit to each other beyond sexual pleasures, how am I supposed to feel for them? Interestingly enough, Alice and Eileen relationship is the best thing of this book since I can actually imagine the yearning-yet-detached kind of bond from them, they felt real. 

With that, I can now assume that I prefer Normal People to this one despite having some similarities in their characters' mannerisms. It more feel relatable and believable and I love them.

logan chung

Beschreibt einfach nur normales Leben, ziemlich langweilig, Haupt Charaktere sind nervig (Eileen) und es gibt sehr viele toxische Sachen in den Beziehungen like why romanticise this 

Ann-Kathrin 

La historia de dos amigas que buscan el amor y la belleza ante un mundo incierto. La nueva novela de la aclamada autora de Gente normal. «El fenómeno literario de la década.» -The Guardian «La mejor novela publicada este año.» -The Times «Literatura en mayúsculas.» -El País Dos amigas se acercan a la treintena en ciudades distintas y tras mucho tiempo sin verse. Alice, novelista, conoce a Felix, que trabaja en un almacén, y le pide que la acompañe a Roma para promocionar su último libro. En Dublín, su mejor amiga, Eileen, está superando una ruptura y empieza a flirtear con Simon, un chico al que conoce desde que eran niños. Mientras el verano se acerca, las dos chicas se envían correos electrónicos en los que se ponen al día. Hablan de su amistad, de sus relaciones, de arte, literatura y de un futuro cada vez más incierto. Dicen que quieren verse pronto, pero ¿qué pasará cuando lo hagan? Alice, Felix, Eileen y Simon todavía son jóvenes, pero pronto dejarán de serlo. Se juntan y se separan, se desean y se mienten. Tienen sexo, sufren por amor, por sus amistades y por el mundo en el que viven. ¿Están en la última sala iluminada antes de la oscuridad? ¿Encontrarán una manera de creer en un mundo bello? Rooney despliega de nuevo su capacidad para analizar el comportamiento humano y vuelve a demostrar por qué es una de las autoras más importantes del momento en una novela que busca la belleza en los claroscuros de la amistad y en el porvenir incierto de nuestro planeta. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION Beautiful World, Where Are You is a new novel by Sally Rooney, the bestselling author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends. Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he'd like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young―but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

Dónde Estás, Mundo Bello / Beautiful World, Where Are You

Silvia Sants

En resumidas cuentas: es, sin lugar a dudas, el peor libro de los tres que ha escrito. 

Puede que la culpa haya sido de las altas expectativas. Y probablemente algunos lo tachen de ir en una línea más madura. 

Sin embargo, bajo mi punto de vista, las primeras 100 páginas son tediosas, con muchísima paja en los correos que se envían las protagonistas y en los cuales no se entiende ni papa. En las siguientes 100 páginas la cosa parece que mejora pero de repente te topas con una serie de escenas grotescas en las que se romantiza la toxicidad, la sumisión, el paternalismo, etc, que por poco hacen que abandone su lectura. Y las últimas 100 son más livianas pero sin mucho sentido tampoco. Por no comentar el final, que de puro absurdo no merece ni mención...

En fin, que he sido víctima del hype y me he llevado un leñazo bastante gordo. El que avisa no es traidor.

hm middle part dragged abit but glad to have finished it😆 very typical sally rooney book (in a good way😅) if i read this a year ago i would’ve dropped it bc eileen would’ve pissed me off but now i lowkey see where she’s coming from and she’s lowkey real 

sophie yang 

Found this better than normal peiple. Mainly because of the Emails send between Alice and Eileen. There are so many good thoughts and well written sentences in their. Also I feel like the characters get a real ending for the first time in a Sally Ronan book and I loved that! It mainly kept me hooked because of Eileens and Simons complex relationship!

I absolutely love this book, it's perfect for everyone wondering and worrying about life, milestones and everything else surrounding it. It embodies all the feelings you have while doing so. It teaches that it's okay to not know everything for certain.

Zarah Hashim

I think this book is truly marvellous because of how ordinary it is. Literature is usually fanciful and artistic in a pretentious way but Sally Rooney (being a Marxist 😆) does not follow this style. Her books are a reminder of the world we live in and this book beautifully summarises the experience.

I wish my life could get this interesting

While reading this wouldn’t be exactly my cup of tea, I did enjoy it. I liked 

 show and this book definitely shares some familiarities about how characters talk and behave. (Somewhat obnoxiously, I guess.) 

Also, lack of quotation marks has not distracted me at all. McCarthy would be proud, I assume. (If it was in Texas and there was a stronger presence of evil.)

While reading this wouldn’t be exactly my cup of tea, I did enjoy it. I liked Normal People show and this book definitely shares some familiarities about how characters talk and behave. (Somewhat obnoxiously, I guess.) 

Also, lack of quotation marks has not distracted me at all. McCarthy would be proud, I assume. (If it was in Texas and there was a stronger presence of evil.)

alice: 4.25/5 she is the most normal even tho she was in a mental hospital, i like her cool and calm demeanor but she should have been with someone better

sam: 4/5 he is SOOOO calm and cool but it’s giving serial killer vibes, but actually golden boy 

eileen: 3/5 she is so messy, like too messy but i think she was able to figure it out in end and she was funny i think?

felix: 2/5 he’s kind of mean, in a too honest kind of way, he’s emotionally intelligent and i think he uses it for evil sometimes, but damn BDE 0.0

Overall, i think i like her other two books better, and i would skip the letters between the girls which is half the book lmao, but finally finished

debbie ojalvo

i’m going to rate the characters:

alice: 4.25/5 she is the most normal even tho she was in a mental hospital, i like her cool and calm demeanor but she should have been with someone better

sam: 4/5 he is SOOOO calm and cool but it’s giving serial killer vibes, but actually golden boy 

eileen: 3/5 she is so messy, like too messy but i think she was able to figure it out in end and she was funny i think?

felix: 2/5 he’s kind of mean, in a too honest kind of way, he’s emotionally intelligent and i think he uses it for evil sometimes, but damn BDE 0.0

Overall, i think i like her other two books better, and i would skip the letters between the girls which is half the book lmao, but finally finished



Charlsy Sekyere

⭐️1-1.5

Insufferable is the most appropriate word to describe this book.

A second word I would use to describe this book would be pointless. Although harsh, I don't care; I wasted my time.

It's a real snooze fest, especially the last few chapters. Just to finish this book, I listened to the audiobook at 2.25x speed.

Despite Sally Rooney's distinctive writing style, I didn't find it unbearable, but that may have been because I listened to the audiobook along with reading. Nevertheless, I didn't find it charming, captivating, or otherwise enjoyable.

It bore me to read the email exchanges between Alice and Eileen. During these email exchanges, topics such as religion, faith, class, love, politics, and so forth are discussed nuancedly. However, those exchanges felt stale, purposeless, and never-ending. There is a possibility that I just didn't have any interest in those conversations. This probably says more about me than it does about the book. However, I just could not get into the characters or their philosophies on topics that had no concrete solution and felt endless. They didn't add any meaningful value to the book, just added more unnecessary pages. As far as I'm concerned, the emails and discussions that took place throughout the book led nowhere. During Alice and Eileen's conversations, I guess the reader is meant to ponder and be equally fascinated, but for me, those sections were a bit tedious. There was just nothing that resonated with me about this book.

Don't even get me started on the 'relationships' in this book. No, just no. Uninteresting, awkward, and sometimes cringe-inducing. Those are just a few words that come to mind when contemplating Felix and Alice and Eileen and Simon's romantic dynamics. The ending was baffling and showed no character growth from any of the characters, particularly Alice and Eileen. At the end, both appeared whiny, pretentious, and frustratingly pathetic. 

DNF'ing would have been possible, but I have this irrational aversion to dNF'ing books. Shoutout to the people who dNF'd this book. You're better than me and I have tremendous respect for you.

One of the least enjoyable books I've read this year. I don't think I can ever touch another Sally Rooney book. If I do, I'll probably need a good 6 months or so.

i think i liked normal people better, but sally rooney has this way of making me think i'm on page. it's uncomfortable, almost, in a weirdly good way?

Bilge Ince

You can actually see the change in process if you look at street photography from before and after 1976. I know we have good reason to be sceptical of aesthetic nostalgia, but the fact remains that before the 1970s, people wore durable clothes of wool and cotton, stored drinks in glass bottles, wrapped food produce in paper, and filled their houses with sturdy wooden furniture. Now a majority of objects in our visual environment are made of plastic, the ugliest substance on earth, a material which when dyed does not take on colour but actually exudes colour, in an inimitably ugly way. One thing a government could do with my approval (and there aren't many) would be to prohibit the production of each and every form of plastic not urgently necessary for the maintenance of human life 

Sally Rooney keeps surprising me with her books. I avoided it for a long time because I thought it was too popular to be good and must be sticky romantic at a level that I’m not particularly eager to read. But I’m happy to say that I enjoyed it very much instead.

Eileen and Alice are too good friends, and this story mainly consists of the letters they have been sending to each other. Eileen is working in a literary magazine, and she is poor and sad. On the other hand, Alice is a famous writer, a celebrity, so to say. However, she has her issues… 

Yet, life evolves, and their existential crises add up to the pandemic. And here we are with climate crises, our struggle with single-use plastics while jet setters have parties in their jets on air, etc. at the end of the day, only one question remains, are we at peace with ourselves considering all?

Time dissolving into thick dark fog, things that happened last week seeming years ago, and things that happened last year feeling like yesterday. I hope this is a side effect of lockdown and not simply a con- sequence growing older.

cher elle

Heleah Soulati

kaitlan

sally rooney writes the way i imagine slowburn depression talks on a tuesday afternoon in a coffee shop, seated next to you on the owner's daughter's hand-me-down couch, dressed in a green sweater and maybe holding a chipped cup of chamomile tea. 

chapter 23 contains perhaps one of the most beautiful sentences i have read: Tenderly, it seemed almost painfully, they smiled at one another, saying nothing, and their questions were the same, am I the one you think about, when we made love were you happy, have I hurt you, do you love me, will you always.

makes me think about what it means to be lonely in the year 2023, and what it means to have friends and the tools to communicate with them, but also what it means that so many things slip between us and from us, like a fish or a single string of spaghetti. some keywords: beauty, situationship, lover, friend, letter, lonely.

perhaps sally rooney's greatest literary talent (and her trademark stamp) is the ability to write incredibly intimate scenes that are also incredibly distant and ambiguous and therefore, i suppose, universally accessible. in this way, you the reader are constantly reminded that these characters are nonexistent strangers, but you also (constantly) cannot help but want to know them and love them. then, in a sudden collapse of reality and fiction, you realize this is the whole paradox of life, and every tender moment of it has brought you here to sally rooney's frail, still feverish page.

the writing in this book is highly self-aware, which is something i love and admire, and (unlike some others) something i don't find overbearing or obnoxious. i think her characters are brilliant and lonely and on the cusp of understanding but also not quite. this book, if it were a feeling, would perhaps be that feeling that you have when you really need to cry but cannot find the reasons why and therefore cannot cry, and everything is just stuck in your chest, and you're breathing hard, but no tears fall. but then everything gets better and without knowing why, you feel okay and you can get through another day. 

this book is like a series of soft pats on your hand while you're navigating that feeling, saying, hey, it's okay, i'm sad too and i also don't know why, and i almost get it but also not quite.

i think the lack of last star has to do with this sense that sally rooney was just on the cusp of something more about beauty and loneliness, which she didn't quite reach because she decided it was unreachable. but also maybe that was the point of the book. i could also insert my thoughts here about how i was slightly disappointed that the big breaking point of the novel was mostly guided by the men and their wisdom and ability to parse their female partners' (?) mental health / attachment issues and remain understanding and steadfast regardless. not sure how i feel exactly about the gender politics of this novel. also how so much of the pain was self-inflicted to a point that made even me feel helpless, but again, maybe that was the point. 

i must say, however, that during the course of the book i felt somewhat comforted, but now on the other end of the page i feel lonely.

anyways, don't want to end on a bad note, so i'll leave another favorite quote and then head to renew my phone plan and maybe go on a run: I suppose I think that having a child is simply the most ordinary thing I can imagine doing. And I want that - to prove the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care. To prove it to whom, I wonder. Myself, maybe.

update: ok jk this book has stuck in my brain and changed my life somehow so even with potential problems i must rate it, yes, you saw it, 5 fat stars

Sommer wilesmith

Florence

My main problem with the book is the characters. I just did not like them, I did not care much about them. Their relationship and their behaviour with one another did not make much sense to me, but maybe that was the point. I could not get their struggles because I could not get how they could be friends or lovers or something in between.

The story was less focused on plot as it was focused on the inner workings and musings of two 20-something women figuring out their life and their purpose. The storyline feels relatable and real, and is extremely personal yet distant. It shows  how you create and control your own happiness and thoughts.

I did struggle reading the book, maybe because of the unconventional in style or the way content was discussed, which is why I wouldn’t reread ‘beautiful world where are you’.

Jonne Scholten

The story was less focused on plot as it was focused on the inner workings and musings of two 20-something women figuring out their life and their purpose. The storyline feels relatable and real, and is extremely personal yet distant. It shows  how you create and control your own happiness and thoughts.

I did struggle reading the book, maybe because of the unconventional in style or the way content was discussed, which is why I wouldn’t reread ‘beautiful world where are you’.

I think it tells us a lot that sometimes it’s us that make ourselves unhappy bc we are afraid of actually being happy 

The new novel from the author of Normal People.

enya

started off so strong but then the characters started annoying the shit out of me and at the last 100 pages i didnt even have to motivation to finish it anymore.. the writing was nice tho

Hannah Lee

everyone in this book is a horrible person!

Cathy Trình

I'd like to talk about this book, but somehow it's so personal that if I were to talk of it at all, I'd be talking about myself.

Vojtech &
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

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Vojtech &Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

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Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney