John Williams - Stoner (1965)

I liked this novel it very much although I can't really explain why. It is narrating a normal life, the life of college teacher William Stoner. You could probably also say the novel is a tragedy, but then isn't all life in a way? It is also a book about teaching and academic life, so, in a way a campus novel, and also about marriage and parenthood. Essentially, I would say it is about the power and fulfillment working with what you love can give you in your life.

Stoner is easy to read, although we feel for Stoner through the difficult passages of his life, the novel does not seem to get heavy, the prose is very simple and straightforward and therefore very fluent

Stoner is was born in 1910 as son of poor farmer but gets the chance to enter university, in Columbia, Missouri, at first to do agronomic studies. Then he discovers his love about language and changes to Philosophy and English. With the help of his tutor, he takes advantage of the possibilities that open up for him and finishes a doctorate and becomes a scholar. It is a character study, about a man who is a bit stoic, a bit passive, searching for quiet happiness in is place of the world, and fulfilling his duties without doing harm, sharing his passion and knowledge with his students.

He gets to know a girl he likes and marries her, then buys a house with help of parents in law. But not all goes smoothly, he seems to have had bad luck with the choice of his wife, in a time divorce was practically impossible. The wife, Edith, is "hysteric", passive aggressive, and sometimes manipulative, which is hard to read from a 2024 point of view, as we get no inside into her head and she never gives Stoner a chance to get along peacefully. As a result, he also has a increasingly difficult relationship with his daughter

University life is about popularity and secret "wars" among  personnel, though he finds solace in the books. In his life he witnesses the impact of two World Wars and the Great Depression. He is teaching Latin, medieval influence on Middle English texts, writes and publishes a book and gets promotes assistant professor, later he gets a full tenure.

"He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book was true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man"

It is a book about the bullying Stoner receives at his workplace and at home, immerging him in a deep depression, but also about the pleasure and satisfaction Stoner obtains from reading and teaching, and from a love affair with younger instructor which, however, could never have ended well.

I have said it often before, books about depressed people, sometimes written by depressed authors are usually really good. Maybe because of some heightened sensibility towards little, beautiful things.

Ottessa Moshfegh - My year of rest and relaxation (2018)

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In the year 2000, New York City, in a flat on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, a 20 something year old woman decides to sleep during one entire year, only waking up every couple of days for basic self maintenance as eating and washing herself. With the help of sleeping pills she gets from a crazy psychiatrist she pulls through with her plan, but not without some side effect. First person narrator takes us with her while she wakes up, a couple of days after falling asleep, usually with evidence in her house that she has been sleepwalking, going to parties, shopping, etc.. When awake she binge watches movies, her favourite ones featuring actress Whoopi Goldberg.

Evidently in a position of privilege, the narrator without name, has enough money to sustain herself for a whole year without working. She is conscientious about this, she refers to herself as a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant; traditionally privileged group of population), but she doesn't care about it, nor does she care about anything in the world. She studied history of modern art at Columbia and worked for some time at a popular contemporary art gallery, a world which she despises, until she is asked to leave because she starts sleeping at work.

It's a fun read, although I would not say I had missed anything if I hadn't picked it up. The kind of book one would want to read at the dentist's, for example, when you just can't concentrate on something serious or profound, but need to get distracted and laugh a bit.

The protagonist is an anti-heroine, who never wanted to sleep away a problem? And then she is so selfish and superficial it can only be laughed at. I think the novel only “works” because it is full of dark humour, beginning with the title. The shrink she finds for her is another crazy figure, a weird cat lady who just gives her more and more pills as she complains about persisting insomnia in her consulting room once a month.

Why does our girl decide to hibernate like this? She is obviously depressed, her parents died, but it could be she was already depressed before. She does not seem capable of having emotions or empathy towards her close ones. These are serious topics, alienation disconnection, disenchantment, trauma, social reproduction, we learn a bit about her upbringing and her current life, but we don't get to explore those problems really closely.

My year of rest and relaxation can seem a depressing novel to some readers, because all social relations are deeply dysfunctional or straight forward abusive, for example, the relationship with her on/off boyfriend Trevor is disturbing, as both partners are relentless egoists. But also with her best and only friend, Reva. She is actually a quite normal girl, described as superficial, interested only in fashion and beauty and calorie counting, but we know this through the eyes of our selfish narrator, so we can be mislead here, Reva certainly has some body image issues. She is there taking care of our main character while she sleeps.

What I didn't like was the ending, it was largely foreseeable. (I won't spoiler it but I say as much as it takes place in the year 2001.). While not as entertaining as I would have liked, especially towards the end, it reads quickly and, overall, is entertaining enough.

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En el año 2000, en Nueva York, una chica veinteañera está deprimida y decide dormir durante un año con la ayuda de varios medicamentos. 

Me divertí, es para mi un libro que sirve de entretenimiento, en el lado leve de las cosas, como mirar una série que nos gusta más o menos, ló suficiente para no pensar que estamos perdiendo nuestro tiempo. Discute temas serios como trauma, depresión, reproducción social, pero con una especie de humor negro o sarcasmo.

Creo que la novela solo funciona porque está llena de humor, la protagonista es un anti héroe, ella es sarcástica, piensa que todo es una mierda, el mundo del arte moderno, en el que trabaja, sobretodo. 

Sonámbula y hace cosas de los que no se acuerda en absoluto. Por ejemplo se despierta tres días después de haberse dormido y descubre que hay fotos de ella tomados en un club de noche. 

Obviamente es una novela sobre privilegio, porque ella tiene dinero suficiente para no trabajar durante un año. Ella es consciente de que es WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). Además esta convencida de ser muy bonita, sin tener que hacer nada por ello. En contraste su mejor y única amiga Reva lucha para mantenerse financieramente y tiene complejos de su aspecto físico.

La protagonista sin nombre, estudió historia del arte y trabajó brevemente en una galería de arte moderno hasta ser despedido por dormir en el trabajo y negligenciar sus tareas en general.

Tiene un novio, Trevor, con quién tiene una relación disfuncional, o mejor dicho, él es tan egoísta como ella.  

Con su mejor y única amiga, Reva, la relación también es disfuncional, pero ella no es egoísta , por el contrario, ella es la única que cuida a la protagonista cuando esta duerme. La protagonista que no parece ser capaz de tener afecto para nadie, por la manera que sus padres la educaron abusa un poco de la gentileza de Reva. 

Me aburren los libros en los que la hija es casi la exacta copia de la madre, encima dándose cuenta.

El final me pareció previsible. 

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.