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Witty and Fascinating

14.08.2019

Now also available in German! This book is dangerously addictive and strangely fascinating, and the true riddle at its core is how Sally Rooney achieves these effects with a text that mainly consists of dialogue, with very sparse atmospheric descriptions, and with a story that is certainly not fast-paced or original. Rather, the focus is on introspection and the attempt to connect to other people in various ways, and Rooney manages to render the situations she describes unsettlingly relatable - what might be a mundane story arc for a literary character is an existential experience for the individual depicted, and Rooney makes the reader feel for her protagonist while at the same time capturing our current cultural moment. Our main character and narrator is Frances, a student at Trinity College (which Rooney herself attended) who has a working class background and enjoys performing spoken word poetry with her friend (and ex-girlfriend) Bobbi. At such an event, they meet Melissa, a journalist, and later her husband Nick, and they befriend the couple who is about ten years their senior. What comes next is to be expected: Frances has an affair with Nick, a depressed actor in crisis, and frankly, not much more happens, but Rooney does a fantastic job depicting Frances' feelings and decisions in the light of current discussions and themes in the context of feminism, moral values, and love. We also get numerous scenes describing Frances' experiences as the kid of divorced working class parents who as a student - struggling to make ends meet - is thrown into a world populated by people with different backgrounds and thus attitudes. It is a real pleasure listening to Rooney's language, which, while not lyrical or exuberant, is witty, smart and precise - this is a book with lots of dialogue written by a former European debating champion. There is something cool and sometimes even pleasantly deadpan about the delivery of the whole book, which tends to stand in vibrating juxtaposition to borderline pretentious statements uttered by some characters, many of them over-edcuated (if there even is such a thing), but limited when it comes to their emotional repertoire. Then again, we all have limits when it comes to our emotional expertise, the differentiating question is mainly where those limits lie, in this book just as in real life. A pretty great book, and I guess I have to read Normal People now. (I listened to the German audiobook; Zoë Beck's translation flows wonderfully and Dagmar Bittner does a great job reading the text.)