![]() ![]() Yet, a Modigliani nude is also exactly the kind of print a university student could find at a freshers’ poster fair, snuggled alongside Che Guevara and Audrey Hepburn. This, of course, is exactly how Melissa and Nick’s thirty-something life appears to Frances and Bobbi at the novel’s outset. A Modigliani print is supposed to suggest a sophisticated, bohemian adult who enjoys long dinner parties, red wine, and cigarettes before bed. ![]() The print is a perfect choice, and not just because both Rooney and Modigliani are connoisseurs of brunettes with unreadable expressions and elongated limbs. ![]() But, at this stage of affairs, it simply indicates to Frances a fully-realised state of adulthood she is yet to enter. In the opening pages of Conversations with Friends (2017) – Sally Rooney’s debut novel that is so culturally notorious it hardly needs even this introduction – 21-year-old protagonist Frances spots a ‘Modigliani print hanging over the staircase’ of Nick and Melissa’s semi-detached house in the Dublin suburb of Monkstown ‘a nude woman reclining.’ Knowing the extra-marital tangle that is to come, the prominent nude might seem to carry a hint of eroticism (of a passive and tepidly cultured kind that would, in all likelihood, appeal to Rooney’s typical readership). A more complex emotional picture emerges in the new TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s debut novel ![]()
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