Normal People – Sally Rooney
The book tells the story of the love-hate relationship between two teenagers who meet in high school. Over time, they realize their love for each other grows amid the challenges of their coming-of-age journey in a gloomy society, filled with snobs and people with hidden agendas.
It’s a dark yet genuine story, offering both insight and caution as the characters reveal themselves. As they navigate the ups and downs of their relationship, they suffer and find redemption, often hindered by their unrelenting personal traits. The portrayal of school life and social dynamics is familiar, taking readers back to the days of high school and college, where life felt like a struggle for those relentless figures. However, as we grow into adulthood, those once-heartbreaking stories begin to seem bland and puerile. The characters’ actions sometimes felt confusing, and their behavior seemed unnecessarily cruel.
The author wrote: “…literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.” It’s not surprising that intellectuals often feel privileged and engage in overly reflective, awkward behaviors. A tricky question remains: how did Sally Rooney manage to guide her readers—a group often caught up in a continuum of pretension—toward the message of simply being a normal person? This message is hard to connect with, especially given the central characters, whose differences stem largely from their family traumas. When the self-loathing protagonist, Marianne, reflects that “her real life was happening somewhere very far away,” it feels like a cry for an idealized life that’s already been diverted. Yet she tries to justify her current academic life and the influence of her platonic or, at times, frighteningly unrestrained friends, who may bring her some good despite it all. 3/5
14.11.2024
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