Dolly Alderton - Ghosts (2020)

to ghost someone = “the act or practice of abruptly cutting off all contact with someone (such as a former romantic partner) usually without explanation by no longer accepting or responding to phone calls, instant messages, etc.”¹

In this case the Ghosts of the title is also referring to a father losing memories due to dementia, and the protagonist losing her old friendships to their marriages and babies.

My friend referred to it as my sex-and-the-city-novel, and I couldn’t describe it better, it’s all about navigating early adult life, believing or not in marriage and love, about ex boyfriends and dating, about being in your early 30s going out and drink and buying your first house and the anxiety of building a future for you and not getting any younger again. Understandably at this stage of life we sometimes feel still like a child and hesitate with certain decisions or struggle with responsibilities. Notably it’s mostly the men in the novel that are selfish, childish, a bit careless and not even honest about it with themselves.

It is clearly a book written for young women. The main character Nina George Dean just bought her first own flat in London Archway, and is back to dating after her long term relationship broke up. As a first person narrator she is retelling the events that happened in her life between her 32^nd to her 33^rd birthday, the “strangest year of her life”, which to me personally didn’t feel very strange or extraordinary at all. Her name is associated with George Micheal, who’s song was top of the charts when she was born.

Nina works a kitchen book writer publishing her own books, sufficiently successful as to be able to live from it. She published a book called “Taste”, a second one “The tiny kitchen”, and is now starting her third one, weirdly she chats with her editor about her personal life, I don’t know if this is common. She used to be a English teacher like her father, in fact she is very close to her Dad, who has dementia and is deteriorating which is a very difficult condition to witness and accompany.

Nina’s ex boyfriend Joe now has a new girlfriend, she and Joe were together for 7 years, now she has been single for 2. So, Nina decides it’s time to download a dating app and starts dating again. She starts going out with Max, 37, tall, masculine, surfer type, accountant, a bit insecure or at least introvert. They fall in love, but after 3 months of relationship Max disappears all of a sudden.

A lot of the novel is just reciting stereotypes. Nina and her friends talk about how friends and their wives behave, men want to impress, girls want to make friends. Lola is her only single friend, a yoga girl with eccentric taste clothing, always drinking prosecco or wine, talking probably about astrology (I don’t remember) a dating expert. A fun character, the Samantha of Sex and the City.

Katherine is her oldest friend, now married with children and moving to the suburbs with little time or comprehension for her childless friends. Nina also has to handle a strange new neighbour in her building who doesn’t respect anything of basic conviviality rules.

She has always had a difficult relationship with her mother who seems a hateful selfish person, with not much of personality anyway. This is put on a further strain with her Dad’s health issues.

So this is it, not much else happens. Nina is looking for meaning in life, in the decisions made y the people around her, but instead she finds mostly only pragmatism or convenience which disappoints her, but doesn’t make her lose her optimism.

I don’t regret reading Ghosts, but the characters are a bit flat, the plot a bit short, and it straight out bored me. It’s not really bad, but definitely not good either. I found it hard to identify myself in any of the characters, even as a woman in my (late) 30s. I can't relate to this life personally, I have very few couples among my friends who actually got married and going to the pubs and drink is a thing that I left in my 20s. I also know very few people who still celebrate their birthdays is their 30s with cake and invitations and their parents and all. Nina listens to female serial killer podcasts, the kind of “true crime” (the worst category of podcast, in my opinion this makes her even more pathetic). The narrator starts the novel announcing “The strangest year of her life” which makes you want to read it, but in the end to me it looked like a pretty event-less year except for the father’s health deteriorating.

Looking at the cover it becomes clear to me that I normally wouldn’t have chosen to buy this book, but I had read a nice recommendation somewhere and made an effort to not judge it by its cover.

Not really funny, not deep, not really emotional, but very readable, however a bit boring and predictable. The kind of book you can read with half of your brain switched off, just to wind down before sleeping.

1https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ghosting

Sally Rooney - Intermezzo (2024)

Después de leer todas las otras novelas de Sally Rooney, la joven autora irlandesa que está teniendo no poco de fama en los últimos años, tuve que leer Intermezzo, la encomendé con ansias y no me defraudó. 

Esta novela analiza el efecto de la diferencia de edades en la pareja y como el duelo de perder un padre influye la vida personal de dos hermanos. 

Me gustó bastante, es una lectura fácil y llevadera con temas algo pesados. Pienso que Rooney evoluciona como escritora y estoy con curiosidad esperando leer mucho más de ella en el futuro. 

Todas sus novelas exploran caracteres y relaciones amorosos dentro de sus condiciones sociales, más que acontecimientos. En Intermezzo se concentra en una relación de hermanos además en las relaciones que cada hermano tiene con las mujeres. Creo que es la primera novela que tiene personajes masculinos en su centro, sus otras novelas siguen más el punto de vista de la experiencia de mujeres, aunque estén narradas en tercera persona. 

Tenemos los hermanos Peter y Ivan Koubek cuyo padre viene de fallecer después de larga enfermedad. Los dos nunca se llevaron muy bien, quizás también debido a la diferencia de edad, pues Peter le lleva unos 10 años a Ivan y están en etapas diferentes de su vida. 

No es un libro deprimente, - y esto fue una preocupación mía antes de comenzarlo, aunque la temática es menos alegre que los enamoros y desamoros de sus otras novelas, de hecho se lee muy bien, se ríe y se llora. En capítulos alternantes entramos en la cabeza de cada uno de los hermanos y vemos sus perspectiva y luego el punto de vista desde afuera, a través del hermano o la novia.

Ivan, el más joven, es un jugador de ajedrez desde temprana edad, no es profesional porque no vive de eso, pero está ganando títulos muy importantes de alto nivel. Toda la gente lo llama un genio, y le molesta, pues para él el termino está mal porque su ranking en el mundo del ajedrez está bajando y su “talento” de hecho es fruto de horas y horas de estudio y practica. A parte de eso se mantiene con pequeños trabajos freelance, de análisis de datos y similar. No tiene mucho dinero pero no le gusta la idea de buscarse un trabajo de tiempo completo en que no pueda desarrollarse y disfrutar según sus intereses. Vive en un piso compartido y por eso tuvo que dejar su perro Alexei con su madre. Pienso que su carácter de introvertido no le hace realizar que se siente solo.

Peter el hermano mayor es abogado, el orgullo de la familia, aunque en realidad siente que esta carrera no le está dando la vida que soñaba, sí que tiene menos preocupación de dinero pero sigue siendo un trabajo arduo cuando se trabaja defendiendo derechos de particulares y no articulando litigios de grandes empresas. Peter está sufriendo de una depresión desde que unos años atrás su novia de longa data, Sylvia, estuvo involucrado en un accidente grave, pero no lo reconoce. Ella sigue trabajando y sigue siendo buena amiga de la familia, pero sufre de dolor crónico y no puede o no quiere ya llevar una vida de pareja porque su dolor le incapacita mucho en la intimidad y no quiere condicionar la vida de Peter. Ahora Peter se ve en el dilema, quiere quedarse con ella. Es el amor de su vida, al mismo tiempo siente que se enamoró de una chica más joven, Naomi y disfruta mucho lo poco complicado es la relación con ella. Interiormente se castiga porque tiene una imagen de abogado a mantener, se ve a si mismo como una persona seria, no como alguien que tiene una novia 10 años más joven a quien le importan más las fiestas que la universidad, ni mucho menos lo ve aceptable por un hombre el hecho de estar involucrado con dos mujeres al mismo tiempo. Ahora cómo resuelve esto? 

Cuando los dos hermanos deciden de cenar juntos pues no se han vistos desde el entierro, la cosa explota, se pelean, los dos piensan tener razón y que el otro reacciona exagerado. Durante los meses de otoño que siguen al entierro de su padre los dos se ven confrontados con sus emociones abrumadores quizás amplificados por el duelo, aunque la muerte de su padre no ha sido una sorpresa y en cierto sentido incluso un alivio del sufrimiento de la enfermedad. Su desequilibrio emocional se vuelve una vulnerabilidad, pues los dos quieren “funcionar” con normalidad. Como casi no hablan entre ellos, y tienen poco contacto con la madre, las mujeres de sus respectivas vidas vienen a ser las que se dan cuenta de todo el tumulto emocional no resuelto.

Un día, en un evento de ajedrez, Ivan conoce a Margaret. Los dos sienten una grande atracción mutua, pero ella está en su trentena unos 10 años mayor que él y cuestiona si se puede permitir esta relación o si la presión social de la sociedad va a ser demasiado que aguantar. La gente asume que ella está abusando del joven. Y es eso que Rooney estudia con tanta precisión, las formas y maneras en que la sociedad nos presiona aunque no queramos dar por eso. Para Ivan, Margaret representa el primer amor real y la relación le hace bien en muchos sentidos. Margaret trabaja en un centro cultural rural y vive un poco aislada en el campo. Ella aún está en proceso de divorciarse de su ex-marido lo que complica un poco las cosas en el sentido de que su madre y algunos conocidos no quieren aceptar que se divorció, y ciertamente no aceptarían la idea de verle con un hombre tanto más joven. Y Ivan por su lado, chocó con su hermano precisamente por eso, porque se le escapó que está viendo una mujer casada, diez años mayor. Peter teniendo una amante mucho más joven que él no estará en la posición de dar consejos, pero esto Ivan ni sabe aún.

Con la diferencia de edad tanto entre hermanos como entre novias viene una diferencia económica, Rooney explora como esta diferencia “banal” influye nuestras relaciones sociales. La amante de Peter, Naomi, vive en una okupa y cuando la expulsan en medio de la crisis de habitación, Peter la invita vivir con él. Le da dinero pero no la reconoce como persona a la altura de sus ojos. Disfruta llegar a casa y que la casa no este vacía, pedir comida rápida y tener sexo. La relación con Naomi es muy diferente de su relación con Sylvia. La última era su compañera de estudios y ahora trabaja en la facultad.

Ninguno de los dos hermanos tiene una buena relación con la madre, Christine desde que esta vive con su nueva pareja y la familia de éste, aunque Peter está más cómodo con la situación que Ivan, que se siente un poco como la oveja negra de la familia y se quedó a vivir con su padre en el momento de la separación. Christine parce un personaje realmente antipático.

En resumen, es una novela que en buena manera Rooney analiza dinámicas de poder inherentes en toda interacción social, las expectaciones de la sociedad, el qué dirán y hace un deep dive psicológico en los protagonistas. Como en todos sus libros hasta ahora las escenas de sexo no me gustan, me parecen poco realistas. No es una novela para todo el mundo. En comparación con sus otras novelas diría que ésta sin duda es más seria, no que las otras no lo sean, pero en el sentido que se centra en un momento difícil en la vida de los personajes. Obviamente al final se resuelven los problemas y todo el mundo sale de eso más fuerte. Yo la disfruté.

Sally Rooney - Conversations with friends (2017)

Published in 2017, Conversations with friends is the first novel by Irish author Sally Rooney who defines herself as a Marxist writer. Born in 1991 she has already published 4 novels which all turned into bestsellers. All of them focus on complex interpersonal relationships in present day Ireland with characters from different social-economic backgrounds.

Conversations with friends is, essentially, a novel about love - love between best friends, lovers (hetero and homosexuals), marriage, parents, children and for oneself. Now, that sounds cheesy but the novel is not. We have Frances, our main character and her now best friend and ex-girlfriend, the self-confident Bobbi. They get to know an older couple, Melissa, a journalist, and Nick, an actor, both in their 30’s. They all feel mutually attracted and start visiting each other and going out together, mostly to literary events. While Bobbi is drawn to Melissa, Frances develops a crush on Nick and starts getting close to him. In the beginning the plot takes off quite quickly and when Francis takes initiative and kisses Nick, we start turning over the pages to get to the spicy details. We get a hint that their marriage doesn't go well but they all handle it like adults, keeping appearances as the couple is not willing to divorce and Melissa is currently writing a feature about France's and Bobbi's spoken word performance for a magazine. We live through intense feelings with Frances as she keeps her affair secret from her best friend and navigates Nick's quite passive character. But it's not all just about love affairs, we are presented with very smart young women, college educated, who observe the world around them and question the social order. As human beings they also face health issues, financial troubles and parents who are separating. When Nick and Melissa invite the girls over to France to spend a vacation with them and other friends in a literary patron's house on the beach, things get beautifully interwoven and a bit messed up, too.

I also had some reservations about the novel. I disliked the fact that in spite of being a writer who studies her characters profoundly, we don't get to know Melissa closely and we also don't get a sample of Bobbi and Francis's poetry performance.

Conversations with friends struck me as very similar to Caroline O'Donoghue's The Rachel Incident (2023) featuring the city of Dublin, English literature students, older men whose wives work in publishing, gay best friends, and financial troubles. Last year, I read Sally Rooney's second novel, Normal People (2018), and didn't like it very much; only okay, I thought. I had picked it up randomly off a book exchange shelf in a park. I didn't know anything about the author or how popular the novel was (There has been a BBC series made out of it).

Some books you simply have to read in your 20's to be able to absorb the magic of them, otherwise you are likely to get bored and can't understand why everyone is talking about them. For me, the most prominent example for these kinds of novels are the ones by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. With Rooney's novels though, I think they are interesting for older readers as well. Even though the first person narrator in Conversations with friends is a 21-year-old and we watch her fall in love and get jealous, or sometimes spontaneously act out of spite, we, as readers, don't feel that we have outgrown these topics because Rooney does a good job making the journey relatable.

According to Wikipedia, Conversations with Friends was subject to a seven-party auction for its publishing rights, which were eventually sold in 12 countries. The novel won the 2017 Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award.

Sally Rooney - Beautiful world where are you (2021)

Sally Rooney – Beautiful world, where are you? (2021)

Beautiful world, where are you? is Rooney's third published novel. In it the author displays much of the same universe as in Rooney's debut novel, Conversations with friends: politically interested, college educated people who bond in intense friendships and complex on-and-off romantic relationships. We find social class differences, a Spaniel dog, people reading the Bible, a bisexual character, age gaps, a beach scene. All the ingredients which have proved to cook bestselling books.

Narrated in third person, we get to know four main characters, all in their late 20s or early 30s. There is Eileen who works at a literary magazine making ends meet on minimum wage. Her best friend Alice has become a successful writer, selling books internationally and making ten times the money Eileen makes – maybe we have some autobiographical or auto-fictional elements there. We meet Simon, Eileen's childhood friend from the countryside, who she is in love with, now working in politics for a refugee aid agency. And Felix, Alice's Tinder date, a down-to-earth, working class boy. So, as in her debut novel we have a quartet – or four person constellation of friendship and love.

Sally Rooney's project is ambitious, it investigates the troubles of young adults in contemporary Ireland, marked by the financial and spiritual precarity of our time. The difficult reality of establishing their own selves, professionally and privately, engaging in serious relationships and searching for themselves, highly thought-through, the characters are so smart and yet so lost in modern life.

Despite having very high expectations for this novel, or maybe because of that, I didn't quite appreciate this one the same way as I did her previous books. This was my personal experience, I still think the novel can work brilliantly for a different reader. In continuation, I will further explain the characters and themes and then I'll get into what didn't function for me.

Alice, the author who got to be a celebrity is struggling with the fact that she can no longer lead a private life. Her success even lead to severe psychological problems. She is often described by her friends as cold and snippy and although trying to change this, she also seems to need space for herself. Whilst she and her best friend Eileen exchange very deep emails, they don't see each other frequently in person, in recent years. She travels to Rome to promote her last book and spontaneously invites Felix, her new acquaintance, to come along. Felix is a fun character, he is kind of the “bad boy with a soft core” of the group, totally out of place at the literary conference, but politely interested in this social milieu, that is new to him. Sometimes he just can't hold back with some observations that stand out to him. Eileen has recently broke up with her boyfriend of three years. Her sister is getting married soon and giving her a hard time for being single with a shitty job and not getting forward in life which she takes to heart, she is a very insecure person and suffers from her friend Alice's detachment. Meanwhile she gets intimate with Simon with whom she had been close since childhood but got estranged in adult life when both worked in different cities and engaged in relationships with other people. Simon is the good boy, the type every parent would love to see their daughters with. A kind of blond angel, successful in his job, religious. Like Nick from Rooney's first novel, Simon is a bit passive. The boys have problems of their own, yet we get deeper into the girls' heads reading their emails.

The novel starts with Alice and Felix's first date, where there are sort of weird silences, they like each other their worlds are so different that they take it slowly. Eileen and Simon are working in Dublin, however Alice has moved to the other side of the country to live alone in a huge house by the sea. We follow Alice and Felix on their trip to Rome. We have the other couple seeing each other, we have parties, lots of sex scenes and in the end all four come together at Alice's place.

As in her other novels the communication between the friends and lovers occurs often via messenger and the author includes long emails Eileen and Alice write each other in which their world-view unfolds. Almost every second chapter is an email between Alice and Eileen, making it half an epistolary novel. These, for me, are the best passages about the novel and make it worthwhile. They discuss their love life and other, deeper questions. Among other things, they deliberate about the absurdities of conservatism, the degenerate mechanisms of the literary market, and “sex studies” as a field lacking theory and vocabulary apart from gender studies. They search for beauty in life reflecting about the nature of “real aesthetic experience”. And interrogate themselves about their generation and the present moment in history. They feel adrift, at loss of an “intellectual home”, like out of step with the cultural discourse as Eileen puts it.

To show some examples, here is what Alice writes on conservatism and capitalism:

I’ve been thinking lately about right-wing politics (haven’t we all), and how it is that conservatism (the social force) came to be associated with rapacious market capitalism. The connection is not obvious, at least to me, since markets preserve nothing, but ingest all aspects of an existing social landscape and excrete them, shorn of meaning and memory, as transactions. What could be ‘conservative’ about such a process? [...] Just look at what conservatives make of the environment: their idea of conservation is to extract, pillage and destroy, ‘because that’s what we’ve always done’ – but because of that very fact, it’s no longer the same earth we do it to.

The girls are mostly on the same page with their opinions and complement each other. Eileen about our specific historical time:

The air we breathe is toxic, the water we drink is full of microplastics, and our food is contaminated by cancerous Teflon chemicals. Our quality of life is in decline, and along with it, the quality of aesthetic experience available to us. The contemporary novel is (with very few exceptions) irrelevant; mainstream cinema is family-friendly nightmare porn funded by car companies and the US Department of Defense; and visual art is primarily a commodity market for oligarchs. It is hard in these circumstances not to feel that modern living compares poorly with the old ways of life, which have come to represent something more substantial, more connected to the essence of the human condition. This nostalgic impulse is of course extremely powerful, and has recently been harnessed to great effect by reactionary and fascist political movements, but I’m not convinced that this means the impulse itself is intrinsically fascistic.

Personally I have lot of the same thoughts and concerns, and I find them brilliantly put into words. Alice on the relationship with her parents:

I have put between myself and my parents such a gulf of sophistication that it’s impossible for them to touch me now or to reach me at all. And I look back across that gulf, not with a sense of guilt or loss, but with relief and satisfaction. Am I better than they are? Certainly not, although maybe luckier. But I am different, and I don’t understand them very well, and I can’t live with them or draw them into my inner world – or for that matter write about them. All my filial duties are nothing but a series of rituals on my part designed to shield myself from criticism while giving nothing of myself away.

They talk about the collapse of civilisation that has occurred in the Late Bronze Age and they think a lot about Jesus, in a theoretical way, what he represents culturally, almost as a literary figure. As it also comes up in other novels, Jesus is an example of how me should try to be loving everyone. Even the dog had behaviour problems in the past but had recovered with the help of love. God as a possible measure of moral good and bad, as the standard of beauty, where otherwise would be a gaping nothing. Discussing why she respects and admires Simon's faith, Eileen writes:

But how is it possible for me to admire someone for believing something I don’t believe, and don’t want to believe, and which I think is manifestly incorrect and absurd? If Simon started to worship a turtle as the son of God, for example, would I admire his sincerity? From a strictly rationalist perspective, it makes as much sense to worship a turtle as it does to worship a first-century Judaean preacher. Considering that God doesn’t exist, the whole thing is random anyway, and it may as well be Jesus, or a plastic bucket, or William Shakespeare, it doesn’t matter. And yet I feel I couldn’t admire Simon’s sincerity if he went down the road of turtle worship. Am I just admiring the ritual, then? Admiring his ability to blandly and uncritically accept received wisdom? Or do I secretly believe there is something special about Jesus, and that to worship him as God, while not quite reasonable, is somehow permissible? I don’t know.

Whereas Simon is more “vanilla” as they would say nowadays, Felix really spiced up the novel quite a bit. He describes himself as “I wouldn’t be known as a great catch, [he said], I’ll put it that way. Not the most reliable character going. And speaking honestly, I owe a bit of money around town as well”. He is actually bisexual, and not knowing he is with Eileen, tries to flirt on Simon. Which makes the reader smirk. When he introduces the three others to his “working class” circle of friend he says: “Now just be normal, alright? Don’t go in there talking about like, world politics and shit like that. People will think you’re freaks.”.

While the email parts are great, I do thing the novel has some bigger problems. It begins very slowly, anonymous, we get little data, little insight, it seems sterile. Rooney's novels are character studies more than plot driven stories and, in general, I love that, although I in this one I missed an arc of narration whereby I could root for the characters to achieve their goals as I did with Frances, in Conversations, for example. The psychological portraits, of Alice and Eileen especially, as deeply sensitive people, are great, but it contrasts with their frequent misunderstandings when they actually meet or talk. The various dates and sex scenes are bad, well I know that's a question of personal taste, but indeed they are all pretty much the same. We don't get warm with the characters in the first chapters, they all seem cold and distant and as a reader. I just couldn't care what happened or didn't happen to them. Once we get to know them, their resentments and behaviour is understandable, but I would have preferred less talking. I got really bored, especially in the first half of the book. At this point I only kept reading because of the philosophical and political reflections in between which on the contrary, I enjoyed very much, which makes me think that I would love to read an essay collection by the Irish author.

Their only goal seemed to be to connect and fall, or stay in love, and plotwise that wasn't enough for me. I couldn't identify, personally, even though I definitely share character traits or behaviours with the girl characters. Identification is the most important element in a good novel. And, forgive me if I'm being bold, Eileen and her insecurities challenged my patience, I found her lack of self esteem irritating and the ending is cheesy.

In conclusion, I think, notwithstanding my critique, maybe for a different public Beautiful world, where are you? is a great novel, Sally Rooney is a smart writer, but it doesn't speak to me, personally. I will certainly recommend people to read it if they like, and then tell me what they think about it.

Beautiful world, where are you? was published by Faber and Faber and won the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year prize. Nevertheless, I will buy Rooney's newest novel, Intermezzo, published in 2024.