flâneur

What’s Your Type? | Merve Emre | The New York Review of Books

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In the opening scene of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, Rooney’s main character, Alice, is having a drink at a hotel bar with a man named

In the opening scene of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, Rooney’s main character, Alice, is having a drink at a hotel bar with a man named Felix, whom she has met online. Afterward, when they return to Alice’s house, Alice reveals that she is a novelist. “What kind of people do you write about, people like you?” Felix asks. The tone of the question is difficult to fix. Is it contemptuous? Appreciative? Is he flirting or insulting her? Alice’s response is similarly, deliberately vague: She looked at him calmly, as if to tell him something: that she understood his game, perhaps,…

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