Sally Rooney

Was in the year below her at TCD. When I heard about her success, I was stoked to check her stuff out, and then found that it is pseudo-intellectual Dublin 4 rubbish. Her characters are shallow self-inserts. Both of her books are identical thematically and in the social milieu described, and even at points, in plot.

As a fellow foundation scholar at TCD the year after she got schols, I found her lengthy description of schols as an institution, down to the precise amounts of the financial benefit it brings utterly cringeworthy.

Inb4 I don't believe you. Couldn't give a fuck whether you believe me because we are on a Ugandan pearl-diving imageboard. But it's all true.

Sounds like dogshit, user. Why would I torture myself willingly?

I believe you and this sounds interesting. Tell me more about it, why is it cringeworthy, did you know her, what was she like? I don't think her works are of remarkable aesthetic merit, nor do I think she seems self-aware enough to improve her art to the point where she is actually worth deeply studying, but she is young and rich and writes literary fiction, which is basically what I'd like to be like, so I'd like to hear what you have to say about it all.

You're on Yea Forums you fucking idiot, what better do you have to do?

Cara is just a bourgeois model actress
I don’t know what you mean though. She’s maybe got extra neanderthal genes. Nothing wrong with that

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>young and rich and writes literary fiction, which is basically what I'd like to be like,

are you a woman?

i've read her work and it is for effeminate males who take note of their lives through their failed romantic relationships.

Damn, that's actually quite an accurate assessment of myself. Wish I could change it, but I'm not entirely sure how to do that, so for the time being, trying to get rich through writing, even if that means staying a pussy, seems like a good idea.

the only way to get rich through writing is graduating through some elite university program. you also have to be a minority in the US. for instance you can find plenty of male versions of what sally rooney writes about in what is called the online manosphere, except they are all online and anonymous bc no publisher can bank off the largely female population of customers buying anything written by a cis white male.

this is a good thing though. accept market defeat and you will be free. literature was hardly ever an easy way to make a living, nor should it be, and i take suspicion toward anyone who wishes it so.

>is essentially the antithesis of chan culture
explain

yeah maybe antithesis is too far, but she is an outspoken marxist whose main characters are clearly sentimental progressives, conveyed in prose in which the only imperative, as she has claimed, is to convey the emotional dynamics of relationships in which friendship and sexuality are able to coexist, which is definitely opposed to the primary aesthetic and moral characteristics of chan culture. A few leftists on boards such as these, here and there, hardly changes that.

The fact that she is a completely capital N Normal person who writes books in which the main characters repeatedly evince direct and thorough engagement with the prevailing cultural theories of modern mainstream leftist online theory makes her opposed to the chan world, I think.

I live in the UK, not the US, give me an example of someone writing like Rooney who is a straight white man, do it, go on, I can't really think of anyone. And how exactly does one get into an elite university program, what sort of programs are you talking about. I am starting at an elite university in October, this avenue may be available to me.

Normal people don't really obsess over leftism they just watch avengers movies and listen to post malone(i dont even know if he's normal but insert the appropriate person here)

if they're normal and intelligent, but not extremely intelligent, and white women, they do.

I dont think so, the really well adjusted types I never hear talking about that stuff. They're into random stuff like meditation and rockclimbing

>she is a completely capital N Normal person who writes books in which the main characters repeatedly evince direct and thorough engagement with the prevailing cultural theories of modern mainstream leftist online theory
By the looks of that she must be a complete bore, then, yet you say:
> If you're an intelligent young person in a developed country, you will at least have a strong reaction to her books, which is why she's worth reading/discussing.

Yeah, well, I suppose that is the true normality, and I guess Rooney is a writer, which no one normal ever is, so maybe I overplayed her normality. Still, she's not a freak like us on here.

i am in fact just being pedantic lol I got what you meant. I do think it's not really possible to be normal and write, it's just a kind of weird behavior. Im not conflating social ability with normality here in case that was how it seemed.

She is boring, that whole ideology is boring and I don't like it, but it appears to sell. Might as well engage a little, here and there. Rooney is one of the least difficult authors to engage with, in that regard.

Me neither, and Rooney seems fairly socially able in the interviews I've seen, she's developed an obsessive marxist worldview into which she can submerge anything too threatening, and this is where her normality comes from, without her quite knowing it; she is unaware as to how conventional her beliefs actually are, such as her apparent belief that monogamy is still an overwhelming cultural force which must be written against. She should read a bunch of Houellebecq or something. I can't blame her, though. She's obviously unusual and intelligent enough to have developed a decent writing style and become a famous author (as much as that is possible) at a young age, and I assume she's been through some de-normalising personal shit in her life, but fundamentally her method for dealing with that (the marxism, the close adherence to modern performative upper-middle class white leftism, claiming weirdness while directly appealing to the most privileged and normal members of society) might grant her the solace to write a couple decent books and get rich, but it won't grant her genuine aesthetic power and eventual internal psychological release. But virtually no one ever gets that anyway, I'd happily rather be her than myself, for example.

>writes literary fiction
Incorrect, Rooney writes chick lit. Mislabeled chick lit perhaps, but it totally lacks even the literary value of an Elena Ferrante, let alone a Dostovyevsky or Cervantes.

Her big selling point is that bitches can read chick lit and pretend to be highbrow at the same time, and deploy the naggy voice if someone questions it.

You make it all sound so fucking banal. Idk I dont begrudge these people their art nor their success, or their entire culture. I obviously do not want them to like stage a leftist coup that ruins my country, but other than that Im fine with them just existing, and my not paying attention to them.

>internal psychological release
What do you mean by this? Eudaimonia, ataraxia, otium?

I meant literary fiction in a modern sense, which I admit happily falls into "chick lit for overeducated and deeply psychologically immature near-rich white people". Obviously I don't think she's in the same galaxy as Dosto and Cervantes, I'm not even sure if I'd put her alongside other jokes like Franzen or Tartt, but that doesn't mean she's not worth analysing, even if purely from a disappointed, dispassionate cultural critical perspective.

Also, is Ferrante worth reading. Her and Knausgaard are the two modern writers I feel like might actually be worth it, but they're both known for quite lengthy series, and I'm not sure if it's worth it or not.

Eudaimonia, specifically that during the last 10 to 20 years of her life, assuming she gets to around 75 or 80, she will look back on what she has written now and will finally realise that it wasn't worth it, it wasn't as powerful and important as I imagine she privately holds her work to be today.

To be more specific, she will probably spend the next thirty years or so of her life writing similar books in style and quality to her current ones, perhaps occasionally trying and failing to write something more formally experimental, searching for a level of aesthetic quality that she is simply incapable of achieving without abandoning some deep personal beliefs and worldviews, and allowing for reasonable variations in personal philosophy, she will deeply begin to feel that as she has never progressed beyond her first two books, they must be the good ones. When she is entering the twilight of her life, she will realise that even they were of extremely limited quality, and Eudaimonia will reveal itself to her as something she could have achieved if she had made major personal changes earlier in life, in the time in which we currently exist, but it will have been too late by then.

Of course it would take a woman to write about something as idealistic and silly and childish as leftism and love.

Pynchon writes about them better than anyone post-war, which is when modern leftism and love began, and may I remind you that he is a man.

based and nietzschepilled
>the two ways should exist next to one another — ideally separated; the one as the Epicurean gods, not concerning themselves with the other

Personally I felt that Ferrante came down on the side of "vapit shit only middle-aged women care about or find insightful", but I could understand if someone legit disagreed, does that make sense as a description?

>I do think it's not really possible to be normal and write, it's just a kind of weird behavior
IMO Montaigne was a very normal person psychologically (yes, despite locking himself up in that tower), most of the things that seem weird to us now were just reactions to or effects of the culture of the time.

nietzsche pilled you say? What is your quotation from

>You make it all sound so fucking banal
NAYRT but it IS banal, she's an enormously banal and conventional person.

Delicious tacos is an easy example, yet keep in mind I never said writes like Rooney. I said does the same thing from the male perspective, i.e. touching on romantic relationships under a political facade with cultural commentary. The only difference between her and some guy writing on a PUA subreddit about how empty it feels in this day and age to fuck and engage and be disappointed by the other sex is that she's safe and marketable and able to produce a profit with little to any maintenance.

Idk why you're asking how one gets into an elite university if you're starting one in October? You mean major? If the university is elite enough literally any will suffice as long as you meet the right people. Here we have MFA's, but I'd wager any graduate degree at Harvard is better than some for private MFA from anywhere, USA.

>Also, is Ferrante worth reading. Her and Knausgaard are the two modern writers I feel like might actually be worth it, but they're both known for quite lengthy series, and I'm not sure if it's worth it or not.

Skip both, read Bolano.

It's from his "Nachlass". This is the citation in German: KSA Bd. 10, 7[21].

I mean, I'm going to study English at Oxford in October, but I don't think an Eng Lit undergrad alone will be enough to harness the institutional power that the earlier user seemed to be hinting at, so I'm wondering what I should do after my degree, or exactly who I should try to ingratiate myself with while I'm at Oxford - is the UEA's creative writing MFA worth anything, is that worth going for?

If a piece of literature is widely read and talked about I have to assume it's complete trash. Off the top of my head I can't think of a single exception to this. Most Americans read at a 6th grade level and it follows that most best-selling books are most appropriate for middle schoolers. Seriously most people are just fucking stupid and it shows in the best seller lists. I have no doubt that since Sally Rooney has taken the literary world by storm her books are shallow vapid pieces of trash. Not once in the last ~15 years have a I seen a "new literary sensation" deserve even half the acclaim they receive.
The exception to this is translated lit but that rarely if ever reaches the same heights as the the stuff like OP mentions.

>The novel is about the complex friendship and relationship between two teenagers, Connell and Marianne, who both attend the same secondary school in County Sligo, and later Trinity College Dublin. It is set during the 2000s downturn period. In the book's story, Connell is a popular, handsome, and highly intelligent high schooler who begins a relationship with unpopular, intimidating, and intelligent Marianne, whose parents employ his mother as a cleaner. Connell keeps the affair a secret from school friends out of shame, but ends up attending Trinity alongside her after the summer and reconciling. Well-off Marianne blossoms at university, becoming pretty and popular, while Connell struggles to fit in properly for the first time in his life. The pair weave in and out of each other's lives across their university years, developing an intense bond that brings to light the traumas and insecurities that make them both who they are.
Why would I want to read this?

well from time to time it's good to read something modern and popular within the literary fiction world to see what's going on, and I can't think of much better than this.

Not him, but there's too much good literature in the world to waste even a single second reading dogshit like this.

Thinking about picking up a copy of Normal People.

The English speaking world hasn't popularized any good modern lit in decades. It's virtually all thinly veiled romance/genre fiction that's called literature because the author has a vocabulary better than a child.

I havn't read her stuff but I read an interview in the Sindo where she states she doesn't read Irish literature or care about Irish authors and basically all she does care about is American lit from the last 50 years. Seems like a reverse plastic paddy, I laughed when I read it

>>At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school football team, while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers

>> Coming to Hulu in 2020.

She's John Greene with tits.

>In the book's story, Connell is a popular, handsome, and highly intelligent high schooler who begins a relationship with unpopular, intimidating, and intelligent Marianne
Lel, so she's a high-fantasy writer.

Think again.

I blame emotionally childish agents.
I particpated in writing groups with literary authors who were so fucking good they should have been published. But there was no twilight-tier instalove romance and they didn't go through the MFA factory.

Also all that talk about We Want Diverse Books is bullshit too because many of these litarary authors were non white. But they don't have the right propaganda narrative. (see article in The Atlantic Monthly called "The One Story Problem).

If you go to Oxford you will get published afterward. You're fucked if you don't go in England.

That is exactly why she has been promoted to fame. The Status Quo propaganda machinery want exactly that. Some one who can still be pitched as remotely "edgy" yet is utterly conventional by white liberal collage student standards. There are many readers exactly like her - white, coddled, clueless about the world at large but knows bad things go on so it must be Capitalism and whypippo's fault. Publishers LOVE promoting this ideology.

You can do that, but I think Conversations With Friends is better, the ending tells you how sappy the whole book really was, but at least it feels earned, for what little it is. Normal People doesn't come as close to actually imparting anything significant, the main two characters appear convincing only because the sexual tension keeps you from noticing how incoherent they are, and the utterly shit rendering of the minor characters, who are less realistic than pokemon NPCs, ends up undermining everything Rooney is trying to do.

the "class aspect" or whatever of her books that every limp-wristed critic seems to praise is laid on so thick and hammered in so bluntly she'd be laughed out of red petrograd

>vapit shit only middle-aged women care about or find insightful
Which demographic needs to care about the subject matter of the book to make it a good book?

Obviously, the book should be equally insightful and compelling to anybody who's not a bigot unable to look past their own situation in life. E.g. it's not a blow against Shakespeare that narrow-minded tards think he doesn't have enough female characters or against Dosto that faggy atheists dislike that he's Christian, but it's a real blow against Ian McEwan to say that he's nowhere near as insightful OR as entertaining as Shakespeare.

I'm Irish and I couldn't understand why she was being promoted so heavily in Irish papers and magazines before her first book was out, before any of her work was in fact published. She's obviously doing something right

>the commodification of political opinions, now in book form!
no thanks

no discernible talent. even her hypemen say she depends on selling idealized figures with correct political opinions that the reader can identify with and so feel good about themselves. she's writing for NPCs and going to make a mint.

Normal middle class people (normies who read) dont do that

>Irish
Watch closely. Tana French is another "Irish" writer heavily promoted. Another Cosmo-globalist sort. There's a quiet cultural genocide going on, Irish is whoever lives in Ireland, not shared history or heredity. That Ireland is modern and has shaken off the old ways, etc. we're more diverse now tralala. Oh, and never mind that firebombing attempt on that Dublin nightclub over the weekend.

It's happening in every Western country user. To find out who is behind it spend 2 weeks on /pol

>should be equally insightful and compelling to anybody who's not a bigot unable to look past their own situation in life
Like Ferrante then?

So she is basically another messenger of the zeitgeist, preaching the same asinine shit.

Didn't read any of her books because I still have hundreds of undoubtedly better, classical works of fiction and non-fiction left to read, but I know for a fact that OP is either Sally Rooney or her handler.

where are all the dumb bitches who were so proudly defending this fraud 6 months ago? based solely on being the loudest voices in a forum where no one else had opened the book?

She looks like an author

Seeing as the main criticisms of her seems to be that she's female and not a white nationalist, what kind of defence are you hoping for

lmao who the fuck brought white nationalism into this

dubs of truth

I think some posters did bring anti white globalism into this, in the form of the moral syphilis which is liberalism.

Your ignorance of the bigger picture is irrelevant.

I swear to god I'm just some random white guy trying to figure out what might sell, and also be aesthetically good, as literature.

>Personally I felt that Ferrante came down on the side of "vapit shit only middle-aged women care about or find insightful", but I could understand if someone legit disagreed
>Personally I felt that Ferrante came down on the side of "vapid shit only middle-aged women care about or find insightful", but I could understand if someone legit disagreed

So you're a bigot who can't see past your own situation?

Not even the same guy, you absolute mad tard. I just quoted him to show how bad your reading comprehension is.