Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney

I think I must be one of the last to read Sally Rooney. I don't know why I did not read anything by her earlier, especially since she seems to get raving reviews from everyone. I can only agree. 

"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?"

I did like this book, although I almost gave up from the beginning. Rooney mixes chapters with an omniscient narrator with chapters where Alice and Eileen exchange e-mails with each other, and confronting themselves with thoughts on life and politics.  I don't like the omniscient narrators since I find the narration makes the story far too impersonal. However, I did give it a chance which I am grateful for. It does work very well with this story. 

Of the four protagonist it seems Felix is the most happy. He is less educated, has a boring job, but takes life as it comes and enjoys it. The other three, well educated,  seem to expect too much of life and are therefore never really satisfied. They have ended up in a sort of 'coma' where they are stuck and not able to proceed with life. 

Rooney's writing is clear and down to earth. You are easily into the novel and its characters. Rooney refers in her afterword to Hegel's views on beauty and freedom. One can see this theme in the story. Beauty is an expression of the free spirit and not just a product of nature. It can be expressed in the creation of arts, referring to Alice and Eileen and their careers in publishing, as a counter pole in the characters of Felix and Simon (in economy). In the end both Alice and Eileen come to terms with their spirits and find a way out of the deadlock and, hopefully, a happier life. Or maybe just to be able to appreciate what they have. 

A very good encounter with Sally Rooney, and I will most likely read more by her.