I'm in an online book club that's themed around movies and TV. We alternate each month between nonfiction books that are about movies and TV, and fiction books that have been adapted into movies and/or TV series. This month, the selection was Sally Rooney's Normal People, a novel that received a lot of buzz when it was published, and was made into a limited series a few years back. This is the perfect time for me to read it, as I have a tendency to read buzzy new novels years after they've stopped being buzzy or new.
The novel follows Marianne and Connell, both from the same small town in Ireland, who forge a strong, short-lived, and very secret relationship in high school, then meet again the following year in Dublin, where they both attend Trinity College. They drift in and out of each other's romantic lives, always drawn magnetically back to one another. I'm about halfway through the book right now, and their increasingly self-destructive behaviors give me the growing sense that deep troubles lie ahead.
Stylistically, this book is different from anything I've read in quite some time. For one thing, Rooney writes her dialogue without any quotation marks, like Cormac McCarthy or Bryan Washington. For another, her prose is very spare. I'm usually a sucker for lush, descriptive language, but this novel doesn't have that. I think it's one of the things that lends the novel such a powerful sense of intimacy. It's almost like the stripped down prose strips away the barrier between me and the characters. It's a 180-degree turn from the last novel I read, a big, sprawling sci-fi epic.
The novel follows Marianne and Connell, both from the same small town in Ireland, who forge a strong, short-lived, and very secret relationship in high school, then meet again the following year in Dublin, where they both attend Trinity College. They drift in and out of each other's romantic lives, always drawn magnetically back to one another. I'm about halfway through the book right now, and their increasingly self-destructive behaviors give me the growing sense that deep troubles lie ahead.
Stylistically, this book is different from anything I've read in quite some time. For one thing, Rooney writes her dialogue without any quotation marks, like Cormac McCarthy or Bryan Washington. For another, her prose is very spare. I'm usually a sucker for lush, descriptive language, but this novel doesn't have that. I think it's one of the things that lends the novel such a powerful sense of intimacy. It's almost like the stripped down prose strips away the barrier between me and the characters. It's a 180-degree turn from the last novel I read, a big, sprawling sci-fi epic.
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