So for me, the way Sally Rooney writes in normal people makes me want to scream. I have read “he says” “she says” so many times I genuinely want to scream. If she just used speech marks then there’s infinite ways of expressing who is saying what but the refusal to use speech marks means she has to tell us it’s speech otherwise it looks like narration. It’s such a jarring stop start writing style to me. Clearly I’m in the minority because people love this book, it has 1.6m ratings on good reads and a 3.81 which is pretty high for the literary girlies. I feel like her not using speech marks, whilst this creates a more conversational vibe to the book it massively limits the ability to add any sort of undertone to the speech. She said this sarcastically she said this angrily.
by Milam1996
5 Comments
That would definitely bother me. There have been books that I couldn’t finish simply because the author had chosen totally cheezy character names. The overuse of the word, “like” is a pet peeve as well.
I really like sally rooneys writing style. I think if she used speech marks it would interrupt the stream of consciousness voice she often uses. It’s definitely not for everyone of course. But I think she’s one of those authors where if it works for you you LOVE her writing.
I feel like in intermezzo it’s especially effective for the older brothers chapters where it’s intentional quite chaotic and hard to decode.
That’s surprising since so many other authors don’t use speech marks or “he says” “she says”. Notably Virginia Woolf
Dean Koontz.
He writes like a virgin romance novelist. When he does flirting/romantic character interactions I want to die.
Never made it farther than halfway through any book of his, and I’ve tried a few.
If I book is from a child’s perspective, but it’s told by the adult the child grew into and it’s just their memory, ala the Virgin Suicides, or Elmet.
I don’t know what it’s called, but I hate it. It’s this immediate unreliable narrator because it’s based on memory, but it’s not really presented as such.