Sally Rooney’s sense of loss

“Where are you, wonderful world? (Beautiful World, Where Are You), by Sally Rooney, translated from English (Ireland) by Laetitia Devaux, L’Olivier, 384 p., €23.50, digital €17.

Return in force of the Irish prodigy. Sally Rooney on paper, Sally Rooney on screens… When you think that only three years ago the French had, for the most part, never heard her name! It is the lightning breakthrough of his first novel, Conversations between friends (L’Olivier, 2019) – a text that has “came out very quickly: 100,000 words in three months! », she confided to us at the time – which turned everything upside down. And this success was nothing compared to that of the narrative which was to follow, Normal People (L’Olivier, 2020), sold over a million copies. Today, while his Conversations between friends spell in series on ArteSally Rooney returns to bookstores with a third novel, Where are you, wonderful world?bestseller since its publication in the Anglo-Saxon world.

To this question – “Where are you, wonderful world? », a verse borrowed from the German poet Schiller – the obvious answer is first of all this: there is, before our admiring eyes, this imaginary world that Rooney was able to create in just three works. It is an immediately recognizable universe, like a painting of David Hockney, for example. What she paints are intelligent, vulnerable millennials, young people with a big heart, quick to be moved and who, tirelessly, auscultate “things and people around them”going from drunken party to drunken party, wondering about the body, sex, capitalism, love, the class struggle, friendship, the galleys (or overflows) of money, brief on almost everything, including the biological clock of one and “soft little breasts” others.

The haunting of the end

We find them, these millennials, in this third novel, but, like their author, born in 1991, they have aged. Alice – an almost anagram of Sally, at least by ear – is a young writer who experienced dazzling success, followed by severe depression. She left Dublin for an isolated house by the sea and met Felix, a warehouseman approached on a dating site. Eileen, her lifelong friend, who is an editor in a literary magazine, has just reconnected with Simon, who works for an NGO helping refugees. The two young women exchanged at length by email on all the themes dear to Rooney. But there is one, new, which emerges in force, it is the fear of the end. Of all purposes.

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