Published by Faber 2018
266 pages
Genre: young
Keywords: teenage love, high school, university, social differences, 2011-2015, Dublin Irland, village life, social media, peer pressure and recognition, self-identity, sexual relationships,
Grade: 2/5
Will I read more by this author: probably not.
This I guess is a modern ‘Romeo and Juliet’ story.
Connell and Marianne were high school students in the village of Carricklea, Irland. Connell is living with Lorraine his single mother he does not know who his father is. He is a sports hero and also a very good student. Marianne is living in the big white house, her father committed suicide, so she is living with her mother, who in the book is completely absent, and her older brother, Alan, a real psychopath. Marianne is also a good student, but is bullied by Connell’s friends and other students for being weird, and what they find most strange, she does not care what they think.
Lorraine cleans Marianne’s house twice a week and Connell picks her up after work. They start a sexual relationship, but Connell demands to keep it a secret, no one must know, what would the school friends think. Connell thought that being alone with Marianne was like opening a door away from normal life (page 7). Marianne felt that her real life was happening somewhere very far away without her, and she did not know if she would ever become part of it (page 11). So, they are never boy-friend- girl-friend; in school they do not relate to one another.
At university their roles switch, she is the popular person and he feels lost and outside, not accepted by the rich people’s children at university. On and off Marianne and Connell are together.
So, what is NORMAL?
One of Connells friends from school, Rob, committed suicide at university, it affected Connell very much; but he thought that Rob would have betrayed any confidence, any kindness, for the promise of social acceptance (page 212). Reflecting on that, Connells thought that he had been the same, he just wanted to be normal, to conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful and confusing.
For Marianne, at the end of the book, she found that being neither admired nor reviled anymore; people having forgotten about her. She is a normal person now (page 254).
There was a lot of buzz around this book when it was published, and it was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. I did not find it interesting or even memorable, but in the book, there is a sentence that for me explains it: culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about (page 221);
that for me is this book.
Quotes:
Marianne: generally, I find that men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves (page 95).
Comments