A little bit of literature

“At the end of last term, the school soccer team reached the final of some competition and everyone in the year had to take the last three classes off to go and watch them. Marianne had never seen them play before. She had no interest in sport and suffered anxiety related to physical education. In the bus on the way to the match she just listened to her headphones, no one spoke to her. Out the window: black cattle, green meadows, white houses with brown roof tiles. The football team were all together at the top of the bus, drinking water and slapping each other on the shoulders to raise morale. Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it. She had that feeling in school often, but it wasn’t accompanied by any specific images of what the real life might look or feel like. All she knew was that when it started, she wouldn’t need to imagine it anymore.”

Vocabulary build-up

The noun meadow means “a tract of grassland, either in its natural state or used as pasture or for growing hay.”

The noun tile means “a thin, flat or convex slab of hard material such as baked clay or plastic, laid in rows to cover walls, floors, and roofs.”

Comments

Sally Rooney is a young Irish novelist whose writing highlights issues of class inequality, intimacy, art, and politics. As a child, Rooney regularly attended theaters, visual art exhibits, and other events with her siblings. She composed stories throughout her teenage years and completed a novel at age 15. Because she attended a catholic high school, she brewed an indignation over conservative requirements, such as female behavior, dresscodes, and the discouragement of premarital sex. Years later, themes of sexuality and partnership outside of marriage would be central to her novels. In 2013, Rooney graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a degree in English literature. Sally Rooney’s second novel, “Normal people”, was published in 2018 and explores a rich area of preoccupation: the strictures, and possibilities, of love under capitalism. As a self-described Marxist, Rooney depicts politics in her novel often as an ambient rather than explicit, submerged under the surface of a love story about, as Rooney writes, “two people who, over the course of several years, apparently could not leave one another alone,” Marianne and Connell, who spend four years alternately pursuing and withdrawing from each other. The pair serve as a vessel to convey themes of class inequality, patriarchy, and identity. She’s embedding politics closely and rigorously within the love story, showing how relationships can function like miniature states, and how political principles can work on an intimate scale, in the interactions of two, three, or four people. Rooney's spare prose has earned her comparisons to Ernest Hemingway. She has also been referred to as “the first great millennial novelist” in The New York Times and The New Yorker. Her affinity in writing complex dialogues and terse ironic conversations attracts avid readers worldwide.