Beautiful World, Where Are You

内容简介

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a distribution warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.

Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young-but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

作者简介

Sally Rooney is the author of the novels Conversations with Friends and Normal People. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the London Review of Books and elsewhere. Conversations with Friends was shortlisted for both the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize, and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. Rooney was also shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award for ‘Mr Salary’ and was the winner of the Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award. Normal People was the Waterstones Book of the Year 2019 and won the Costa Novel of the Year in 2018. It was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2018, as well as the

Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2019. Sally Rooney co-wrote the television adaptation of Normal People which was broadcast on the BBC in 2020, and for which she was nominated for an Emmy award.

原文摘录

有时我认为人类的关系是柔软的，像沙或水，而我们将它们倒入某个特定容器，从而赋予了它们形状。因此，一个母亲和她女儿的关系被倒入一个名叫“母女”的容器中，这种关系便拥有了盛装它的容器的轮廓，被装在里面，无论是好是坏。或许有人做朋友不开心，但做姐妹的话就非常融洽，或者有的夫妻做父母和子女反而更好，谁知道呢。但去缔结一段没有事先规定形状的关系会是什么样呢？就是把水倒出来，任它坠落。我想它不会有任何形状，而是四处流淌。我觉得这有点像我和费利克斯。我们之间没有明显的路径通向任何可以前进的关系。我不觉得他会拿我当朋友，因为他有朋友，而且他们之间的关系和他与我之间的关系不同。比起和他们，他和我距离更远，但同时，在某种意义上，我们又更接近，因为我们的关系不受任何边界或习俗的制约。 它如此非同寻常，原因不在他或我，也并非我们拥有什么特殊的个人特质，甚至无关我们独特的个性组合，而是我们发生关系的方式——或者说我们缺乏发生关系的方式。也许最终我们会退出彼此的生活，或者变成朋友，还是别的什么。但无论发生什么，至少是这场实验的结果，有时我觉得这个实验太糟糕了，有时又觉得我只想拥有这种关系。