Normal People

I was told by my best friend that this one was one of her favorite books, so I finally read it, even though it had been sitting on my desk for the past six months. I think the way this book hits depends on your state of mind, and I wonder if I was just not in the right frame of mind to enjoy the book to its fullest. To me, the book literally felt like one giant long run-on sentence (due to the flow-of-consciousness-y prose and lack of quotation marks when speaking) or like one of those dreams that go on and on and never end.

I think this book increased my general anxiety about life.

It’s a book about two characters who, due to their various insecurities and inability to properly articulate them, dance around each other’s lives, each desiring more than anything to be with the other as romantic partners, yet ruining each chance due to some small misunderstanding that was amplified by some insecurity budding inside their head. The characters were very well built, the details about their lives in Ireland were compelling, the dialogue felt natural and poignant, and so maybe it’s an impressive thing that this book about two people’s lives was able to impart a sense of anxiety and dissatisfaction upon my own life.

The miscommunications that occur between the characters are documented very well.

Quotes I Liked

• “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, says Marianne. I don’t know why I can’t be like normal people.”
• “Outside, her breath rises in a fine mist and the snow keeps falling, like a ceaseless repetition of the same infinitesimally small mistake” (205)
• Commentary on depression: “He was like a freezer item that had been thawed too quickly on the outside and was melting everywhere, while the inside was still frozen solid. Somehow he was expressing more emotion than at any time in his life before, while simultaneously feeling less, feeling nothing.” (221)
• Commentary on childhood friends: “We didn’t have a lot in common, like in terms of interests or whatever. And on the political side of things we probably wouldn’t have had the same views. But in school, stuff like that didn’t really matter as much. We were just in the same group so we were friends, you know” (223)
• Commentary on literature: “He knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured … It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterward feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.” (228)
• “It’s funny the decisions you make because you like someone, he says, and then your whole life is different. I think we’re at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions.” (239)