Amazon.com.au:Customer reviews: Beautiful World, Where Are You

Top positive review

Doesn’t stray far from the author’s other two novels

Reviewed in Australia on 30 September 2021

If you are a fan of Irish millennial author, Sally Rooney, and her other two novels, Conversation with friends, and, Normal people, you are probably in for a treat. That is, unless you felt that these two works said everything you wanted hear on love, friendship and living as an intellectual, hip, 20 something in Ireland in our current times. All in all, the latest novel is an easy read. The style is economical and lean, like a contemporary Hemingway. It probably plays to Rooney’s strength in not straying to far thematically or narratively from Rooney’s other works. Worth a read.

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Didn't get all the hyper about this one.

Reviewed in Australia on 15 September 2021

My first taste of Sally Rooney and sadly, probably my last. I didn't enjoy this book at all. I found it long winded and aimless (I feel like I was missing the point of it all?) Characters were obnoxious and not even likeable so I struggled to take to any of them. Those long winded emails were a drag to read! Started losing patience halfway in, and it didn't get any better. Ended up skimming the rest just to finish it. Here's a quick summary - Four people: they like each other, don't like each other, are intimate, then not intimate, and somewhat depressed. And that's it. Ending didn't offer any resolve or bring anything new.

9 people found this helpful

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Danger Mouse

Doesn’t stray far from the author’s other two novels

Reviewed in Australia on 30 September 2021

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2 people found this helpful

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Hewy

Beautiful World

Reviewed in Australia on 15 October 2021

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Self-absorbed, self-indulgent.

The first half of the book was ‘scatty’ - characterisations very mixed up and hard to discern.

Uncontrolled.

Eventually the four main characters evolved, but as a reader my feelings about each constantly changed. As they changed? I don’t know.

Sadly Sally, I can’t recommend your new book.

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Kindle Customer

Two quarters of a whole

Reviewed in Australia on 12 February 2022

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I enjoyed the intimate nature of this book and the way perspectives can be shaped by the characters' observations and disclosures. No one can really know anyone else unless we are privy to their inner dialogues, however reliable those actually are. Eileen and Alice are two seemingly troubled young women, who rely to a perhaps unhealthy degree on each other and the validation of their partners, Simon and Felix. But one is left wondering - are the male characters not similarly troubled and angst-ridden? Felix reveals as much in his own straightforward way. Simon, though, comes off as a saintly caricature. I feel this book would have been even better if all four characters were afforded the same interior perspectives granted to Alice and Eileen. The novel could still maintain its elusiveness - Alice and Eileen are still able to surpise and shock each other when they actually meet in person. Giving Simon and Felix inner lives could have yielded a richer exploration of character and motivation without overwhelming the narrative or wrecking its sense of the unknowables and multitudes we all possess and for the most part guard. StilI, I was utterly absorbed throughout.

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Janette Sheen

Absorbing, thoughtful with superb observations of both people and their surroundings

Reviewed in Australia on 13 December 2021

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In my reading, this is a book that not only explores relationships and their meaning but various approaches the ‘30 somethings’ take to the issues in living and in the world at large.

About two thirds of the way into the book I became so absorbed in what Sally Rooney was saying that I didn’t even pick up the phone when it rang

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Jian Yu

good

Reviewed in Australia on 1 December 2021

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Reals a lot of genuine aspect about youth

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Hamid

a must read

Reviewed in Australia on 23 October 2021

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An inspiring and absolutely amazing book. It is a must read from a phenomenal writer

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Levi Huxton

Sex, friendship and the end of civilisation

Reviewed in Australia on 12 September 2021

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Alice and Eileen think a lot about sex and friendship. Now thirty, they worry they’re obsessing about sex and friendship while civilisation crumbles.

In emails pinged between Dublin and County Mayo, they write articulately about the end of the world – inequity, greed, climate change, pollution, celebrity – and their lot in its midst – as women, as writers, as members of a specific class. Perhaps sex and friendship are the only things that matter since civilisation is ending and even as grown-ups, they are powerless to do much about it.

Alice made it rich and famous as a novelist, but success has only hollowed out her sense of self-worth. In Felix, a working-class lad who – at first - looks unlikely to treat her well, she seeks the proof of her worthlessness. Meanwhile Eileen struggles to find purpose or sustenance as an editor in a literary journal. Panicked by stasis, she’s not sure she deserves the love of childhood friend Simon.

In between their epistolary conversations are chapters in which Alice, Eileen, Felix and Simon’s actions are described with curious detachment. Rooney applies her immense gifts to charting their cerebral and physical connections without an ounce of ironic distance. In treating her characters’ concerns with the utmost seriousness, she imbues those concerns with deeper significance.

Could the rare and precious relationships we sustain with those who truly wish us well add-up to nothing less than the sum of the beauty in the world? And if so, how high the stakes in keeping them alive! Were these relationships to rupture so too would the safety net over the bottomless despair Alice and Eileen glimpse each time they are alone.

The scrutiny Rooney’s been under – just thirty, three acclaimed bestsellers in four years - would drive any sensible writer to reclusion, or even to stop publishing. This would be our immense loss. The work this most parallels, for me, is J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, not just for its thoughtful letters and the formative arguments therein, but for its preoccupation with crafting a meaningful identity in a flawed world where authentic beauty is fleeting and ego constantly threatens to swallow us whole.

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AmazonCustomer

beyond the hype, a very fine novel indeed

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 September 2021

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Not quite sure where to begin, only that I very nearly didn't bother to read this novel because of the relentless hype around it. I find it all so toxic. To books, to writers, readers too. I was not a great fan of Normal People, thought it okay, but hyped. BWWAY is altogether different -- delicious, clever, wry, witty -- and left me with that rare tipsy feeling I sometimes get on finishing the book. I enjoyed it *enormously*.

36 people found this helpful

Andrew Vermes

Beautiful writing is worth some effort

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 September 2021

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This is literature of the highest quality, though I have a feeling that some fans of Normal People will be disappointed. Mirroring the confused relationships of the characters Rooney lays bare the confusion of our modern world with its meaningless glitter sitting next to extreme poverty. If you prefer straightforward love stories some of this will come across as preachy. Pay attention and you'll be rewarded. A couple of reviewers mention they read this in hours. This is worth taking time over. The last book that I found as beautiful was The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard over 10 years ago (and I read a lot).

19 people found this helpful

P. G. Harris

Insightful or pretentious - you decide

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 October 2021

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Alice is a recently successful author who is recovering from some sort of breakdown in an old rectory leant to her by friends. Felix is the warehouse worker she meets via Tinder. Eileen, Alice’s friend from post university days is scraping a living working for a publisher. At lunchtime she meets up with Simon, a political worker she has known since childhood and with whom she flirts heavily. Alice and Eileen write long emails in which they constantly reaffirm their dedication to each other, in between long monologues about the state of the world, their position in history, and their relationships with Felix and Simon.

This is certainly a challenging novel, about which it has taken me some time (weeks) to reach any form of conclusion. That conclusion is that it is a fascinating, thought provoking, deeply insightful work. However in writing that I feel almost as intellectually false as our current vacuous excuse for a prime minister, writing two letters, one in support of Brexit, one in favour of remaining. I could equally have called it poorly structured, self-indulgent and pretentious. Indeed at the book group of which I am a member, there was not a great deal of love for it.

It has to be said that these are four largely unlikeable characters. Alice and Felix are snarky and unpleasant, Simon is a sanctimonious hypocrite and Eileen is just wet. Indeed, one of the most telling sections of the book comes when Felix questions the other three, aggressively asking why, if they profess to love each other so much, they spend so little time in each other’s company.

The main strength of the book is in exploring the utter powerlessness felt by millennials. They know they live in a world where they sit at the top of an unjustifiably unequal pyramid - in one strong moment early on, Eileen visits a convenience store, musing on the poverty of millions which enables her to be able to select from an unnecessary cornucopia - but also feel unable to do anything about it. Climate change also looms over them, with a number of references to being born at the end of times. These feelings of helplessness give rise to the question as to whether they sit hopelessly in the face of overwhelming circumstance, or are they just self indulgent moaners who sit around finding clever parallels with history as a way of avoiding actually doing anything, As in Conversations with Friends, I got a strong feeling that Rooney peoples her books with the kind of arts students who have developed a pose of supposedly fashionable world weary ennui by the age of 18.

The exposed ridge-walk between entertaining and annoying is also explored by the massively self referential nature of the book. Felix researches Alice on line and accuses her of writing “dirty books”, just before Rooney writes another sex scene. (Sadly it has to be said that Dead Ringers on Radio 4 has done her no favours, the mechanical nature of the romantic encounters steer dangerously close to that audio pastiche). Within a book about a successful author, Rooney has Alice stating that no novelist could write a book about their real lives, as no one could possibly find it in any way interesting. I do fear however that this book may be the literary equivalent of The Wall, in which massively successful, expensively educated Pink Floyd whine about how awful it is to be massively successful, expensively educated rock stars.

To return to the light side, one of the joys of Beautiful World is once more the economy, the efficiency of Rooney’s prose. In a world where the over intricate graduates of creative creative writing courses are too prevalent, her ability to create o comprehensive picture with a few light brush strokes is a joy.

And what is the beautiful world? The suggestion is that amidst the horrors of global poverty and climate change, the only real beauty that can be found is in close personal relationships. All we can do in the face of the awfulness of modern existence is to cherish friendship and love. That said, this is a book which deals in big themes, with catholicism being a strong element, both through Simon’s overt faith, and through the cultural undertone which seems to affect the thoughts of all but Felix.

The big disappointment of Beautiful World is the subject matter. After readingNormal People and Conversations with Friends, I found myself hoping that Rooney would release her imagination and step away from her own immediate experience. What has she done? Written novel about a successful 30 year old novelist. I know all authors in some way have to write from their own experience, but Rooney is a massively talented wrier, and so this seems to lack a degree of ambition or challenge.

6 people found this helpful

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