![]() ![]() As the words of Yeats suggest, there is an enormous emotional void at the core of her characters. It is literally and figuratively only epidermis deep. ![]() This is also the frustration at the heart of her work. The reader is hooked and the pages blur past. With meticulous craftsmanship and brilliant skill, we are offered instantaneous surface intimacy as Marianne and Connell fall for each other without much preamble in high school, then oscillate in and out of each other’s lives. This is also her paradoxical appeal: deep attention to opaque surfaces. Her theme is an intensely focused and obsessive observation of the surfaces of relationships. It has harvested many further awards (the British Book Award the Costa Book Award the An Post Irish Novel of the Year) and rave reviews (“Sally Rooney is a master of the literary page-turner” “absolutely engrossing and surprisingly heartbreaking”). Her second work, Normal People (2018), featuring the intellectual loner Marianne and the athletic star student Connell in a small town in the West of Ireland, has been another magnificent success. Following the success of her first novel, Conversations with Friends (2017), internationally celebrated Irish novelist Sally Rooney (1991-) possesses an imagination that unfolds within the irony of Yeats’s aphorism. “All of life is a preparation for something that never happens,” commented William Butler Yeats in a weary aside towards the end of his life. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |