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

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.