Sally Rooney was extremely young, only in her mid-twenties, when she became a literary superstar.
In 2017 and 2018 her novels "Conversations with Friends" and "Normal People" appeared one after the other.
Both books were about young people in and around Dublin who expressed themselves in endlessly meandering conversations about the location of their private lives.
They discussed feminism, heteronormativity and class differences in late capitalism with ruthless honesty.
And that with such a subtle contemporaneity that the press messianically exclaimed the “voice of a generation”.
Certainly that voice was remarkable. It goes without saying that a generation born in the 1990s has long lived the imperatives of the twenty-first century: individuality and diversity. Bisexual experiences, for example, were a natural part of the amorous Rooneyversum. In her books, however, one was not homosexual or straight, but had a love life in which patriarchy was modeled, discarded, and reprogrammed. And you always talked about what that did to you, why and whether you were good or bad. Love and friendship were put to the test. But unlike the sixty-eighties without any dogmatism. Great speeches to improve society were at best made playfully in Dublin's shared kitchens.The performative self-contradiction reliably sabotaged the attempt to subject one's own existence to a reduction in complexity.
After a couple of years of the Rooney boom, some critics of the Rooney boom have grown tired of it.
They found their books to be overrated and inadequate.
So if you pick up Rooney's new novel, you can certainly no longer do it with the attitude of the explorer-critic.
The notorious strangeness of lovers
At the center of “Schöne Welt, wo bist du” is the friendship between the former collage students Alice and Eileen, who write the entire novel about letters and only really meet once. The discrepancy between alleged kinship and physical distance will reveal the handicaps on both sides at the end of the novel. But we are not there yet. For this it takes two male intruders into the female cosmos. On the one hand, the lovable Simon, who, after years of egg dancing around his childhood friend Eileen, finally realizes that he is the right person. On the other hand, Felix, who at the beginning of the book is suffering from a terribly screwed up Tinder date with Alice.
Eileen and Alice, it quickly becomes clear, are both variants of the bestselling author Sally Rooney. Eileen works as an editor for a Dublin literary magazine and has to get over the breakup with her longtime boyfriend. Alice is an internationally acclaimed writer who has retired to a small Irish coastal town to recover from her depression.
As always with Rooney, chat histories are incorporated into the flow of the novel. Mails are hacked into opened laptops and played back at all times of the day and night. In an idiosyncratic mix of irony and melancholy, it deals with the question of what it means to be political today. More precisely about the question of what all this has to do with our ability to love. And how one can ever be close to people in an age of media super-reflections. At the end of “Conversations with Friends” it was still promising: “You have to go through certain things before you understand them.” You can now admit to the characters in the new novel that they have gone through something far from the earlier books.