2023-07-24 22:45:15
Luke is an unrepentant cheater. Celine is a piano virtuoso more interested in music than family life. They are a couple and they are getting married in a year. During that time, they must find happiness, or at least that is what they believe. This is the synopsis of The happy couple, the new novel by Naoise Dolan that has just been published in Spain by Temas de hoy publishing house, translated by Esther Cruz Santaella. According to the book summary, it could also be signed by her compatriot Marian Keyes, queen of ‘chick-lit’ [etiqueta creada por la industria editorial para agrupar a libros románticos orientados al público femenino]. But the writer is part of that new Irish literary generation led by Sally Rooney, who escapes from that reviled qualification for her criticism of romantic love and because they tell her stories from a class, gender and LGTBI + perspective. Or because she addresses an audience of a different generation, which considers couple models in a different way, although, in reality, the substratum of the novels is the same: the sentimental lives of the protagonists.
A copy of Virginia Woolf’s first novel with handwritten notes by the author appears in Australia
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In fact, thanks to that theme, both Keyes and Rooney have sold copies like hotcakes, but they have also received a lot of criticism. Both the overwhelming fame and the opinions about his books affected them psychologically – the former had a long relationship with alcoholism and the latter secluded himself in a house in the country – the same thing that happened to Dolan after publishing his first book. exciting days (Today’s Topics, 2021) which, although it was not a sales phenomenon, did receive a lot of attention. The author, who suffers from Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), published a love letter to Berlin, her current city of residence, in The Guardian at the beginning of June. That ode to the German capital begins with an explanation of her move from London: the mental collapse to which the pressure of success led her.
“I hit rock bottom after three whole days without sleep, by the end of which my feet had swollen in a very sexy way, I shuddered to background noises and my own voice sounded like it was meters away,” he explains in his writing. “After managing to sleep the third night, I woke up 16 hours later with several missed calls. Someone from my literary agency had waited for me in vain for an hour in a nearby coffee shop with a contract that I urgently needed to sign. A few days later, at lunch with my agent, I broke down in tears, ”she says. The author was unable to meet deadlines and lead a functional life in general, but a visit to a friend in Berlin did her good enough that she saw a light at the end of the tunnel.
The importance of mental health and the need to improve attention to problems such as anxiety, burnout or depression that she herself has experienced seems important to her, but she believes that they should be treated from other, less individualistic therapeutic frameworks than the usual ones. “Many of us live and work in an environment that would make anyone anxious, exhausted or depressed. As much as we try to overcome our childhood traumas, if our current environment does not improve, we will continue to be sick, ”she comments. “Of course, it’s not about one or the other. It is good to pay attention to mental health at the individual level, but it must also be taken into account when we talk about housing, employment or climate change ”, she qualifies.
For the moment, his idea of changing his surroundings continues to work for him and, to this day, his idyll with the city continues. “My German is currently at a C1 level, that is, I am not even close to the native level yet, but I speak it fluently. I am still working to reach C2 in German, but I have also started studying Italian to prepare for a trip to Rome in September, ”he comments to elDiario.es. “I have always liked learning languages. I studied Irish, French, Japanese and (of course!) Spanish in high school, and tried to learn Cantonese in Hong Kong, although unfortunately I’m a bit rusty with all of them now,” she maintains.
He has also modeled his relationship with fame and exposure to the public. The formula is not to think about what strangers may be thinking about her or her work: “I have a rule: if someone wants to give me their personal opinion, they can send me a text message. If you don’t have my number, you don’t really know me. The parasocial figure that people talk about publicly is something that they have invented among themselves. “It has nothing to do with my everyday life, it’s just something that happens out there to an imaginary person,” she says.
A wedding and more than one conflict
The writer’s fondness for studying languages can be seen in the details of her novels, which are not without certain parallels with her life. Her first book takes place in Hong Kong, where she has also lived, and Irish is a key language in the second as one of the protagonists uses it to exclude another from the conversation. In fact, the conflict between the Irish and the English is present in both titles. For Dolan, this problem has increased in her country after Brexit. “There is a huge sense of anger and betrayal that the British could jeopardize the peace in Northern Ireland without having a clue what they were doing, while the majority of the Irish were well informed but had no say in the matter. I imagine that is a bit of what most of Europe felt when Trump was voted in, ”she maintains.
There is a huge sense of anger and betrayal that the British could jeopardize the peace in Northern Ireland without having a clue what they were doing.
Naoise Dolan — Escritora
One of the first things that catches the attention of The happy couple It is the construction of the characters, specifically Celine. A woman who lives by and for music, who lives in a world of sheet music and who gives so much importance to her relationship with the piano that she always wears gloves. It is what makes Luke notice her in the first place, but also one of the pitfalls of the relationship. Dolan needed to study a lot to shape the figure of the pianist because, although he has general knowledge of piano and music theory, he knew nothing of what life is like for musicians today. He could have chosen another profession that he knew more about for Celine, but he chose this one for no apparent reason. “I don’t know why I decided, it was just instinct (instinct is the reason for 99% of my writing decisions),” he says.
From this book it also stands out that in 2023 people as young as Luke and Celine want to get married and celebrate events such as the commitment ceremony. Basically, because all this has a conservative spirit but they are not (or do not seem so). “I don’t think any of the characters have particularly consistent or principled political convictions. Even when they do invoke leftist rhetoric, it is often for transparently self-serving ends. For example, when Luke complains about the ethics of art under capitalism, it’s pretty clear that he’s really just complaining about Celine,” the writer states. “In that sense, they remind me a bit of the younger generation of the series. Succession: they invoke progressive ideas when, and only when, it suits them,” he says.
Parallel relationships are a constant in Dolan’s work. For example, in the first novel, Ada is with both Edith and Julian (although there is only romantic love with Edith). In the second, there is another similar situation in terms of the number of people involved. “I think that people can be very fluid in their relationship patterns, but they also have the capacity to get stuck in their habits”, the author develops. “So it’s interesting to see which path they take: is someone the same with different partners, or does they behave differently with different people? You discover a lot about a character when you put him in these kinds of situations,” she maintains.
At barely 31 years old, Noise Dolan already has two published novels and, thanks to the first –which will soon be adapted into a series format, as has also happened with Rooney’s titles–, he was a finalist for such renowned awards as the Women’s Prize for Fiction or the Dylan Thomas. But her relationship with her success has already commented that it has not been exactly easy, so one wonders what success means to her: “Eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. It is the dream that I have pursued the most throughout my life and the one that continues to resist me the most”.
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