Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Sally Rooney’s novels don’t deserve to be translated into Hebrew

Sally Rooney (photo: Getty)

I recently had to read a book by Sally Rooney in a work capacity, and my goodness that was half an hour of my life I’ll never get back. Come on, how could I be expected to read the whole darn thing when I’d already had the pleasure of Conversations with Friends and come to the conclusion that once you’ve read one book about people getting naked and saying stuff about the pointlessness of life, you’ve read them all?

Her writing is so blank that in parts it reads like a children’s starter book — Janet and John Get Naked and Say Stuff about the Pointlessness of Existence. Rooney describes herself as a Marxist and she doesn’t use speech marks. Is the concept of ‘a plot’ itself a bourgeois construct? Reading Rooney, you might think so.

So, despite being such a fan of the excellent state of Israel and its gorgeous people, I wasn’t as cross as many of my mates — Jews and allies alike — when the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Rooney would not allow her latest gem, Beautiful World, Where Are You, to be translated into Hebrew.

Is the concept of ‘a plot’ itself a bourgeois construct? Reading Rooney, you might think so

Little Miss Sunshine is, predictably, a follower of the profoundly joyless and hypocritical Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement which appears to believe that a nation’s rough treatment of certain sections of society only counts as a crime against humanity if Israelis do it: about as logical as believing that there are no calories in food if you eat standing up, with the fridge door open.

In the interests of consistency, I do hope that Miss Rooney will be forgoing the massive Chinese market by refusing to be translated by a regime which sterilises and enslaves its minorities; and that she will also boycott an Arabic translation, considering how many Arab countries treat women as a cross between children and chattels and enjoy executing homosexuals.

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