Intermezzo by Sally Rooney: book review

Intermezzo
 by Sally Rooney 

Overview: Ivan and Peter are brothers, but not the close kind of brothers. Between the decade of age gap and the fact that their personalities dance at two ends of the extreme, it would've been hard for them to deeply bond. But when their dad dies, the boys suddenly have a life altering common reality. Peter is a lawyer in Dublin balancing his deep emotional affair with his ex-girlfriend, Sylvia, and his very physically motivated affair with a girl his brother's age. Ivan, on the other hand, is a chess genius coming out the other side of a dark spiral down the incel side of the internet. When he meets Margaret at an exhibition chess game, his romantic luck turns around. Margaret is thirty-six to Ivan's twenty-two and is still technically married. The brother's messy romantic luck and their grief send them on intersecting paths that might finally force them to come together. Overall: 4

Characters: 4 I like everyone in the novel. They're all both endearing and flawed—the perfect mixture for a book. Peter is the older brother and sees himself in a superior role in life. He has a settled career, a respectable degree, and a solid circle of friends. He almost had the fairytale romance too, but after Sylvia was in a horrible accident, she broke up with him believing she wouldn't be able to fulfill him due to the lingering pain from the accident. But they never stopped loving each other or left each other's lives. Still, Peter did move on, dating Naomi who's in university herself, much younger than Peter and moonlighting on OnlyFans as her only source of income. She might as well be Sylvia's opposite, but that has its own appeal to Peter. He can't imagine his life without either of them in it in a romantic capacity, but he also can't reconcile what that might mean for his self-concept of being exceedingly "normal."

Ivan has just finished university and is entirely unsettled in life. He was closer to his dad, and he's left to contend with the displaced family dog. Ivan also doesn't have a settled career. He's nearly a professional chess player, lauded for his abilities at such a young age, and he's monetized this to some degree along with picking up random freelance jobs. He's barely scraping by, and his chess game is falling off. Ivan's insecurities have also lead him down some of the darker parts of the internet, a phase he's coming out of when the book opens. During one of these chess obligations, he meets Margaret who runs an arts centre in a rural Irish town. They take an instant liking to one another that's compelling. Margaret sees possibility in Ivan, while Ivan needs the confidence boost of being affirmed by someone older. 

For all their lack of convention, the couples in this novel are ones you do want to cheer on. And I appreciated the evolution of the brothers' relationship as well. Being siblings is often painted in stories as an effortless bond of understanding, and that's just not the case for all siblings. Before the boys can grow closer, they have to figure out why they'd want to do that and even if they do. That felt very honest. 

Plot: 4 I'm having a very hard time evaluating this book because it took me a ridiculous amount of time to read it. Partially, I do blame the book. It's a tough one to get into. The writing style, which I'll discuss more later, is somewhat off-putting in the opening chapter, and it develops quite slowly. There's no real sense of urgency, and while I didn't find it unpleasant to read, there was nothing that made me feel like I needed to make time to read the next page. Part of that might have to do with my life since September 24 being pretty chaotic. I will 100% own that. But I have been consuming all the media I can about this book because both Sally Rooney's writing and the discourse around it is fascinating, and I did hear one of the co-hosts of the Shameless podcast say she also had a hard time finding a sense of urgency with reading the novel as well. I started to feel the pressure to finish it in the days leading up to my trip to Dublin because I wasn't about to haul a hardcover in my very limited carry-on luggage space. I also feel like the novel really opened up in the second half as more of the emotions and complex dynamics solidified and eventually the brothers' stories intersected. 

Writing: 3.5 This is my sticking point with this novel. The first chapter is rough. I was so relieved when I saw a few bookstagrammers note the same in their early reviews—that the first chapter is uniquely extra hard to read. Peter's chapters are written in a strange style that omits nouns and pronouns in a fairly baffling manner. It just takes a lot more work to understand, and it interfered with how much I wanted to read. I had no issue with Margaret and Ivan's chapters, and for a while, I liked them much more just as a consequence of liking the writing style that Rooney used for their voices much better. I love how easy to read Rooney's novels typically are, and this book does not deliver that effortless yet literary experience. Intermezzo is certainly good in its own right, perhaps even more literary or highbrow or something like that. But I found Peter's chapters, particularly that first one, pretty off-putting. If I wasn't a longtime Rooney fan, I can't say that I would have continued to push through. I'm glad I did. I ultimately enjoyed the last quarter of the book quite a bit, but I can't say this ranks close to my favorite at all. 

Saying this, I also know that Rooney's books typically take multiple reads for me to fall in love with them, and maybe sometime next year, I'll have more evolved feelings. But as of now, this new experiment wasn't really for me.

More on Sally Rooney

hope, romance, confusion, fragility: defining the Sally Rooney novel and growing up

Conversations with Friends review

Beautiful World Where Are You review

Beautiful World Where Are You re-review

Beautiful World Where Are You re-review (2024)


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