Sally Rooney - Blog Posts

Ohhhhhhhhh i have some RAGE against Normal People by Sally Rooney. Can I understand, intellectually, that there are legitimate reasons to like this book? Yes. Do I emotionally agree with any of them? ABSOLUTELY NOT. First off this book was impossible to read easily because of the lack of punctuation, what was up with that!! Beyond that the relationship between the two main characters was just bad and really imbalanced, and also I was not interested at all. Also the weak ass Marxist commentary??? Girl didn't even commit 🤣 And to top it all off, I read this for a bookclub for a college that I did all the precollege stuff for, and they DIDN'T EVEN LET ME IN!!!!!! Anyways fuck this book so much, enjoy my rant :)

I accept and appreciate your offering.

It's bullshit that they didn't let you in. Book clubs are supposed to bring people together, but some of them get so snobby.

t h o u g h t s

It's been a few minutes,

My head on your shoulder, your arm around me

Neither of us utters a word.

What are you thinking?

You ask, breaking the silence.

I'm thinking,

About the day we finally accepted how we felt,

And then the world tilted, the hourglass turned,

How every day we're slipping away, gradually

One sand grain at a time.

I'm thinking,

How unfortunate it is that our fate's already written

That we were to be like parallel lines

Destined to be together

But not with each other.

I'm thinking,

How long are we going to take it, one day at a time?

One call, one heart emoji, one I miss you at a time.

Like a recovering addict,

Each day takes us twelve steps away from each other.

I'm thinking,

How the time we are together is snowglobe moments.

How we are confined to only a moment in time.

While the world around us moves on and on.

And we relive one perfect yet fragile moment.

I'm thinking,

How we belong to each other today,

For now.

How wonderful it'll be if the world ends today.

While you are mine and I'm yours.

So I don't have to see tomorrow.

When the hourglass is finally empty

When either of the parallel lines ends.

When we are so apart that we stand out of sight

When the snow globe falls to the floor, waking us up.

Instead,

I try to come back to that second,

To your voice, eyes, and presence,

Instead, I say,

I'm thinking about getting ice cream.

Back home, Connell’s shyness never seemed like much of an obstacle to his social life, because everyone knew who he was already, and there was never any need to introduce himself or create impressions about his personality. If anything, his personality seemed like something external to himself, managed by the opinions of others, rather than anything he individually did or produced. Now he has a sense of invisibility, nothingness, with no reputation to recommend him to anyone.

- Normal people by Sally Rooney

Normal people by Sally Rooney

“All these years they´ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions.”

I don´t really have an opinion on this novel, only emotions, which probably is the best compliment you can give a writer, even if the emotions aren’t entirely pleasant ones. But then, pleasantries are not what books are for. Normal people is an incredibly simplistic book, and I mean that in the best way possible. The language is light and easy, because it doesn’t need to be anything else to fit the story and its characters.

Marianne and Connell grow up in the same small town in the Irish countryside. Connell is, despite his shyness, quite popular and well-liked, while Marianne´s opinionated personality and her overall weirdness makes her an outsider for her classmates. Because Connell´s mother works for Marianne´s rich family, they get to know each other outside of school and start sleeping with each other, only to realise how much they like each other and how close they have grown. This ends before they go off to college, but there, they meet again. Now, Marianne has a big group of friends and is highly admired, whereas Connel struggles with fitting in at Trinity, especially because of his social status. Still, he and Marianne find their way back to each other and stay close over the next years, sometimes romantically involved with each other, sometimes as each other´s friends or confidantes.

“It´s not like this with other people.”

With them growing and growing up, the relationship is constantly shifting. I wouldn’t call this novel a love story. It is more that these two people have an understanding about how they are respectively, and who they are to each other. It is a story about life and about growth and things that happen to us and things we do to ourselves and to others. It is, needless to say, a wonderful story.

„He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her.”