Interview Sally Rooney: "I could have emigrated like so many other young people of my generation in the middle of the crisis, but I decided to stay in Dublin and now I am paying the consequences"
Sally Rooney
announced Tuesday that she will not transfer the translation rights to her latest novel,
Where are you, beautiful world
, to an Israeli publisher
in protest of Israel's policy in Palestine.
The 30-year-old author recalled in a statement that two recent reports by humanitarian organizations have described the situation in Palestine as
"apartheid"
, which is why she has decided to support a boycott promoted by
the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
(BDS, its acronym in English), reports Efe.
Rooney has stated that it would be
"an honor" if his novel could be translated and read in Hebrew
, but that he prefers not to do so with an Israeli publisher.
Her previous two books,
Normal People
and
Conversations Between Friends
, were translated into Hebrew by Katyah Benovits and published in Israel by the Modan label and are still available for purchase.
"
I understand that not everyone will agree with my decision
, but I think it would not be right under the current circumstances to accept a new contract with an Israeli company that does not publicly distance itself from apartheid or support the rights of the Israeli people stipulated by the United Nations. ", has affirmed. The writer explained that her decision is a response to the call of
Palestinian civil society
in its search for "freedom, justice and equality."
Rooney's decision comes after two highly critical of Israel reports released this year, one from Humans Right Watch and one from B'Tselem, one of Israel's leading human rights organizations.
In May, Rooney already signed a letter with thousands of artists calling for the international isolation of Israel.
It also so happens that Rooney is originally from County Mayo, Ireland, where the concept of boycott originated in the 18th century after Irish peasants refused to work with English landowner
Charles Cunningham Boycott
due to extremely harsh conditions. that imposed.
The news comes a month after Rooney has published his third novel, in Spain published by Random House Literature and is especially relevant because the writer has established herself with it as a global phenomenon that has shaken the world of books.
And it is that not every day what has happened with the appearance of
Where are you, beautiful world
happens
: nerves, queues, tweeter hyperventilation, reselling of galleys at 200 dollars (more than Franzen's, at 165) and a child's excitement On a Twelfth Night more typical of a new Harry Potter installment.
Is it really that bad?
The truth is that
Rooney has never hidden his political interests
: She is famous for cleverly mixing highly addictive romances and lengthy disquisitions on Marxism in her novels, and the last one is no exception.
Where are you, beautiful world
revolves around four young people: two friends, Alice and Eileen, who are approaching thirty, and their respective partners Guadiana, Felix and Simon. They all navigate more or less fruitlessly into adulthood without ever feeling that they are doing something of profit with their lives. Alice is a
successful writer, now a millionaire, who meets Felix on Tinder
.
Felix is bisexual
, works as a stockman in a warehouse and has just lost his mother. Eileen spends her days without money,
moderately dissatisfied
as an editor in a literary magazine without much future. Although she has just left him with her boyfriend of the last few years, she does not miss him and the superficiality of her own sadness scares her: she believes that she will never be completely happy. Simon is the one with a life more like that of an adult: he works as a lobbyist for an organization that defends immigrants and lived for a time in Paris.
He is a practicing Catholic
and tends to date girls much younger than him.
As in Rooney's novels, all the characters have some kind of emotional flaw that prevents them from listening to themselves and establishing a moderately healthy relationship with others. Both the plot (girl-meets-boy) and the themes are the same as always: the
tension between social classes, millennial precariousness and the role of literature, ideas and beauty in a world deeply marked by the transactional
, and how all this affects intimacy and relationships.
Alice, in whom many have seen a transcript of Rooney herself, is self-defeating because success has opened the doors to the literary ghetto, an ecosystem that she despises but does not avoid. Media overexposure does not take anything well. "I can't believe I have to put up with these things: having articles written about me, seeing pictures of me on the internet, reading comments about myself," she confesses. "
I keep running into that person, who is myself, and I hate her with all my might
. I hate the way she expresses herself, I hate the way she looks, and I hate her opinions about everything. And yet when other people read about she, they think she's me. Facing this fact makes me feel like I'm already dead, "she writes in one of the many emails she sends to Eileen.
Comparisons are inevitable, especially since Rooney, who has been somewhat clumsily labeled "the Salinger of the Snapchat generation," has drastically limited her public appearances. The transformation of the book into a consumer good,
a commodity that serves to achieve social status but with little room to really change things
is one of the issues that concerns not only Alice, but Rooney herself, who in more than one occasion has defined himself as Marxist.
Eileen and Alice feel that
"the world stopped being beautiful after the fall of the Soviet Union"
, a date that coincides with their year of birth. Both are aware of the dangers of nostalgia and its reactionary drifts, but they feel that everything around them, both nature and the world of ideas, has been spoiled and is ugly.
"The contemporary novel is (with very few exceptions) irrelevant
; commercial cinema is a pornographic nightmare for the whole family financed by the US Department of Defense, and visual art is almost entirely a market of raw materials for oligarchs", Eileen believes .
"I believe that Rooney connects in a very honest and without artifice with personal concerns that, in my experience, are not restricted only to the millennial generation," says his translator into Spanish, Inga Pellisa. "I know that
a lot of people find it frustrating that they go some way to presenting their characters without judgment
, without clearly positioning themselves, and that they refuse to conclude and put a reassuring closure on the stories, but I personally think that helps. to give it more flight and, in sight, to make it more addictive and
generate debate around it "
.
Pellisa was also the translator of
Normal People
and thinks that both books move in a very specific and similar universe that Rooney is still exploring. "In fact,
his characters could cross paths at some point. They could be career or work colleagues.
What changes is the place where he has decided to put the magnifying glass, but translating I have felt that we were returning to a half conversation," he reflects.
Normal People
was the novel with which Rooney became a literary star: it sold a million copies worldwide and HBO shot a series that popularized the figure of the
"intimacy coordinator"
, an expert whose mission in filming is to make make the sex scenes as comfortable as possible. In Rooney's novels, and in
Where are you, beautiful world
, it happens again,
there is a lot of sex
. Does your translation have an extra challenge? "In the dialogues and sex scenes, the text flows in a very natural way, nothing gets stuck, there, and it is interesting to detect the nuances, sometimes very unspoken, locked in pauses and silences and subtle linguistic choices", explains Pellisa . "It is something that seems very difficult in any discipline.
The danger of falling into the grotesque, the corny or the ridiculous when taking out of context something that, in his books, has such an intimate character, lurks at all times
.
So without a doubt, getting how she manages to keep all that at bay and that the scene absorbs you - and, in fact, excites you - is a particular challenge that motivates me a lot, "he concludes.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more
Israel
Palestine
Tinder
Spain
Ireland
culture
literature
LiteratureThe last Jews of Alexandria in the wounded memory of André Aciman
LiteratureWhatsapp, the lawless territory of pirated books
LiteratureAlaitz Leceaga: "All authors reflect in some way our own time"
See links of interest
La Palma direct
Last News
How to do
Holidays 2021
Home THE WORLD TODAY
Baskonia - Panathinaikos
Real Madrid - AS Monaco