"Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice Marianne is strange and friendless.
It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Here's the moon seen in the afternoon sky: ".like a transparent wafer, or a half-dissolved pastille.and you cannot be sure whether it is from its taut, uninterrupted surface that this round and whitish shape is being detached, its consistancy only a bit more solid than the clouds', or whether it is a corrosion of the basic tissue, a rift in the dome, a crevice that opens onto the void behind." Luminous, knowing, lovely literature.Ī young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up-sorry, can't tell you how it ends! Even if these satiric overtones aren't picked up, though, Palomar's humanity is always the chief hire-his and Calvino's splendid prose (expertly rendered by the redoubtable William Weaver). Calvino, maybe the subtlest of all living writers, picks up along the way various intellectual fashions (Marxism, deconstructionism) only to put them down again gently askew: a Foucault-ian visit to a butcher shop is a standout. Each short non-adventure is another illustration of the beauty of the subjective, that which we nonetheless try to destroy or transcend. Palomar's old-married-pair quasi-conversations) how turtles mate the way birds must see the world below as all surface the vagaries of the head overruling the eye (Palomar, on a topless beach, tries not to observe the naked breasts-then decides, on philosophical grounds, to observe them-to predictably outraged results).
Some of the things he observes: how the "sword" of the sun's reflection on the ocean always stops exactly at a swimmer's eye the possible meaning of birdcalls (humorously contrasted with Mr. Hulot: at odds or at war or in love with the big in small, the small in big, the whole old figure/ground confusion. Palomar-who, as his name suggests, would like to be the clearest, adroitest, purest non-participatory observer.yet, since he's a man, not a telescope, can't quite pull it off. The most philosophical of Calvino's works, a set of semi-comic meditations upon infinity undertaken by a nobody/Everyman named Mr.
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