Hasmik Simonyan: Why you should read Sally Rooney's "Normal People" novel (Trailer in Armenian)

If you are looking for a good book, congratulations, Sally Rooney's "Normal People" novel is now published in Armenian. If you want to watch something in the evening, the TV series of the same novel is available. You will read this book in one breath and will most probably stay awake for a night or two. 

Girls born in 1991 know how to write. The novel is written in simple language and at least in the beginning, you won't even imagine that this is not a stereotypical romance. Instead, you will find the most essential objective of the book behind the obvious and evident episodes. The deeper layers of the book tell about interpersonal relationships and the impact of social inequality on it. All of this is combined with Sally's Marxist outlook. 

To be in this or that social stratum, we need to possess certain material things. Books are a ticket to an "intellectual space". The book has become a commodity. By paying for a book, you become "cultural". This is what one of the protagonists of the novel, Connell, noticed. Commercialization: Emotions, people, everything. In order to exist, you have to own something, we buy things to prove that we are the owner, and if we own a material thing, therefore we exist. 

Marianne is not really interested in material things. What bothers her? "I don't know how to be normal". This is what Sally Rooney said in one of her interviews. "We are not able to talk about feminism, because we talk about it only in the simplest terms. There are various layers to the topic, yet we choose to only ask if women should be strong and successful or not." 

The novel, in fact, depicts the life-long relationship of these two people. They are breaking up, then coming back together. And the same cycle again and again. They make each other happy and hurt each other. Sometimes they speak, but oftentimes they are just putting words together. They both know that people need people and they need each other. Getting to know each other is like growing together like a plant. 

Will they be able to let go of each other? "You should go, - Marianne says, - I will always be there". You are reading and sobbing because you are hurt, too, because it was real, it was both normal and abnormal, because none of them were "normal people", but rather crazy minds.