"Normal people": Scene from the series adaptation of the novel with Marianne Sheridan (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Connell Waldron (Paul Mescal)
Photo: Enda Bowe / Element PicturesTo put it straight: Sally Rooney's second novel is much better than her first. Anyone who has read and liked "Conversations with Friends" will have even more fun with "Normal People". Anyone who read the first book and did not find it so good should give it another try now. And if you haven't read or even heard from the author and are now wondering what the excitement is all about, you can say: Please read "Normal People" and then decide whether it doesn't matter or is fantastic. It's quick too. Promised.
Sally Rooney
Photo: Simone Padovani / Awakening / Getty ImagesSally Rooney is 29 years old, Irish, and has a reputation for being the best writer of her generation. Her publisher sells her as the "salinger for the Snapchat generation". Now people like to say that, but with Rooney, one was sure, that was really the case for once. "Conversations with Friends" was a great success, "Normal People" (in the original: "Normal People") an even bigger one. According to the New York Times, it has sold over 1.5 million times since its US publication in April 2019. Now it is finally appearing in a German translation.
Both novels are about intelligent young people who fall in love and have to deal with the problems that arise as a result. Because love is complicated. Even the succinct titles of the books suggest that nothing extraordinary will happen here - and at the same time they are also a pleasantly unpretentious understatement, because of course what is being negotiated here is ultimately very big. It is this contradiction that makes Rooney so interesting.
Much is fleeting, only love is not
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Title: Ordinary People: Novel
Publisher: Luchterhand literary publisher
Number of pages: 320
Author: Sally Rooney
Translated by: Zoë Beck
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Product reviews are purely editorial and independent. Via the so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when making a purchase. More information here"Normal People" is about Connell and Marianne who go to school together, move from the small town to Dublin to study, get together, separate again, but still have sex again. You go on Erasmus, Interrail holidays, and sometimes try drugs. The average life of young urban people in Western Europe. Nothing special. Or?
"It's not the same with others," says Marianne once to her boyfriend after sex, what exactly? "I know," replies Connell. But they also don't know a lot: what they want to study, how they want to live, what exactly they want to be for each other. Their lives are characterized by uncertainties, and that too is typical of their generation. The job prospects are poor. The relationship status is unclear. The sex, after all, is free. But this freedom also creates problems. Does Marianne really want to be humiliated in bed? Or is it just a way of self-punishment for despising herself so much?
That their relationship is special, that what happens between them, which is usually described by the somewhat helpless term "chemistry", is priceless and unique - that seems to be the only thing they know exactly. The only thing that is not volatile, interchangeable, or relative. Your love, and it has to be said so pathetically, is like an anchor for both of them. It saves them from the depression. It saves them from self-contempt. It saves them from arbitrariness.
In that regard, "Ordinary People" is very old-fashioned, if not traditional. Love is only superficially something exciting here, in truth it turns out to be a safety factor.
What makes Rooney's stories, "Normal People" even more so than "Conversations with Friends", is their language. It is completely devoid of pathos. There are no images, no metaphors, no poetry. Clearly and without frills, she tells how two people find each other to give each other support. That is comforting. And sad at the same time. Because of course everything stands and falls with love. Woe to those who never find them or who gamble away.
This, too, is another Rooney paradox: everyday, simple language is what makes the characters and the stories they go through special. It enables a tremendous identification of the readers with the characters. And since you never feel normal yourself, especially as a young person, these completely normal ailments are something special. Because they are their own.
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