Intermezzo

I loved Ivan and Margaret's story and enjoyed Peter/Sharon/Naomi, but I never got used to Peter's fragmented stream-of-consciousness voice.

I’ve been waiting for a Rooney book for two years now. In short, I would literally die for Ivan. Can we talk about Peter’s stream of consciousness (such an interesting writing form but I kind of liked it / felt like I was genuinely in his head)?! I was intrigued to see how she would write a brothers dual POV story, but holy Sally could never stop surprising me.

One thing that Sally NEVER fails at is understanding people and writing the most REAL feelings. This story is about two brothers who are grieving their dad who’s just passed after a long, grueling battle of cancer. She captures grief in two different perspectives with Ivan and Peter — and again like I can’t express how does the woman just understand every emotion that’s humanly possible and spit it out on paper in the most relatable and engrossing way. AND THE RELATIONSHIPS DONT EVEN GET ME STARTED. My heart to all of the women in this novel - Sylvia, Naomi, and Margaret. And the IMAGERY. She accomplishes so much in just a stream of four word sentences.

Of course I’m biased to Rooney, but I don’t even think I need to explain myself on that regard. She’s a literary genius.

5⭐️

★ ★ ★ ★ ½
Wow. This was honestly unlike anything I've ever read. At first I thought the way it was written was just going to be for a chapter or two, and if it wasn't, I remember thinking I don't know how much more I could read. I was wrong. Don't get me wrong, plenty of books have made me emotional in a variety of ways. But this one was so different. It was so real. The plot itself was life, and all the mess, sadness, joy, love, pain, despair, friendship, beauty and chaos that comes with it. It honestly made me anxious and depressed at points, and I had to take breaks or refrain from reading. I highlighted a lot of excerpts from this one, mainly from Peter's chapters, that I thought were funny or just so real. I'm obsessed with how genuine she was able to write these characters and really portray exactly how they think and feel and process and act. It wasn't just the words themselves, or a perfect selection of adjective it was the cadence. The flow, or sometimes even the lack thereof.

“In silence they lie together for a time. Sense of them both having dropped a long pretence. Wants almost to say more. Tell her everything, what happened, is still happening, the agony, hatred he wakes up with every morning, wishing he was dead, fear of losing her, both of them. I can't go through it again. I'm sorry. There's someone else. I think it would be better for everyone if I. No need however he thinks to speak.”
“What then. Whole thing getting out of hand. His life, widening black emptiness from which he could only avert his eyes.”
“Why do you have to leave. Why does everyone, why does everyone always have to leave me, why. Actually, I'm sorry, before I settle up, I'll have the same again. Vodka, yeah, thanks. Can I pay with card?”

This one. The seamless switch from spiraling, depressing, depressing, self-loathing, thoughts into an ordinary and seemingly uneventful exchange. Ordering another drink. Asking to pay with card. Meanwhile the thoughts he's having are all consuming, bringing him down and down. Trying to drink it all away, when inevitably, that won't lead to anything productive or good, yet it distracts. It takes you away from life, even for a little, but sometimes only to suck you back down into the pit you were trying to crawl out of , with a force ten times more powerful than what it took to get out.

“Well, if that's suffering, he thinks, let me suffer. Yes. To love whoever I have left. And if ever I lose someone, let me descend into a futile and prolonged rage, yes, despair, wanting to break things, furniture, appliances, wanting to get into fights, to scream, to walk in front of a bus, yes. Let me suffer, please. To love just these few people, to know myself capable of that, I would suffer every day of my life.”

How to even describe what reading that does. MY heart actually hurts for him. The life he so desperately wants to live, impossible, and out of reach. That feeling in life when you have no control of what's happening to you or around you. And all you can do is just be in a little boat alone trying to ride out the waves and not capsize. The people we love are just as much as part of us as our sense of humor, favorite color, or food. To lose two people, in very different senses of the word, yet both devastating. It's no wonder he is feeling the way he is. But also to recognize the privilege it is to have people you care so deeply about, that losing them would cause such deep despair. That is life. Part of what it means to live, as tragic and painful and awful as it is.

“Life, which is now the most painful ordeal conceivable, was happy then, the same life. A cruel kind of joke, you'll agree. Anyway, you're young, make the most of it. Enjoy every second. And on your twenty-fifth birthday, if you want my advice, jump off a fucking bridge. Thanks.”

Funny, sad, lonely. This was his rock bottom. The rejection and ensuing fight with Sylvia. Immediately buying a bottle of vodka, drinking the entire thing on a train ride to see his ex-girlfriend. Only to be met with his brother. Getting in a terrible fight with him, then drunkenly crawling to his mom's house. Only to wake up, make the journey back home, contemplating different forms of suicide. Then he opens the door and the two women that have become as essential to him as his legs, are in his living room. In denial of his feelings, or maybe just so lost and confused he barely knows his lefts from his rights at this point. Trying so hard to make sense of everything and rationalize it, yet to no avail. There is no optimal solution, Peter. That's the truth of it. You can't have it both ways. He knows this. Says this. And maybe to keep them both in his life would keep them both happy, but not him. Later, he says about Naomi: “That he has come to love her, such an absurdity: like a stage fight where it turns out the knives are real.” I loved this line. I feel like it could be applied to so many scenarios in life. You think you know exactly what to expect. Something rehearsed, or normal—mundane. Maybe a bit fun. Entertaining. But no! The knives are real. Maybe you get stabbed, or worse, you stab somebody. The fun is over. The monotony disrupted. Now you enter a new chapter of your life, one with the pain of being stabbed or being the stabber. But maybe it is not all so bad. In the end, he found a way to at least begin preparing his relationships with those he cares about. All it took was to show up, and to be honest. And honestly, I think that's all you can ask of someone.

At the core of all that is the fact that this just a slice of life that Rooney has excellently captured. Never have I read something that so accurately depicts what it's like to live. And I know that's a strange thing to praise, as at the end of the day, I am living a human life, and so is literally anyone else that reads this. I know books are sometimes used as an escape from reality, to not have to think about what it means or feels like to be human. But I think it's important to be reminded of and have to face the nuances of life. To remember that things aren't necessarily as clear as they seem. Like Ivan and Peter's relationship. Brothers, a decade apart. Perpetually at different stages in their life. Inherently very different people. Yet, at the end of it all, able to say I love you to each other, and spend a Christmas together. Despite all the anger and jealousy and resentment that lingers between them. Or Sylvia and Peter. How complex of a relationship they have, yet, it makes so much sense. I don't know, I think I just really appreciated how authentic everything in this book was. I feel like I often find myself a bit annoyed or tired with now unrealistic some other books I've read are. I think it was also a bit cathartic. Although they aren't real people, just to know that life isn't as easy as we are all trying to pretend it is. To sum it up, intense, heartbreaking, and comforting. This one has left me with a lot to think about, and, honestly, a bit of a new outlook on things.

ugh. DNF a quarter into this.
If you're describing a person's every single thought, make them interesting at least.

Diminishing returns on my Sally Rooney experience:
book 1. loved
book 2. loved
book 3. ok-ish
book 4. couldn't even finish

"Intermezzo" explores grief, family dynamics, and the complexities of human relationships. While it showcases Rooney's signature style of prose and observed characters, the novel falls short of the high bar set by her previous works.

The story revolves around brothers Peter and Ivan after their father's death. Rooney's strength lies in her ability to dissect the minutiae, which shines through in the brothers' strained relationship. The alternating perspectives between Peter and Ivan provide an exciting contrast, offering insights into their distinct personalities and coping mechanisms.

I found the writing to have some sharp moments that remind me why she's become a literary sensation. Her depiction of Dublin is a vivid and fitting backdrop to the characters' emotional journeys. However, "Intermezzo" lacks narrative drive. The plot meanders, and while this approach might be intentional, mirroring the disjointed nature of grief, it left me feeling disconnected from the characters' experiences.

Where the story truly resonated with me was the portrayal of the brothers' relationship. As someone with a complex sibling relationship, I was deeply connected to the tension between Peter and Ivan. The way Rooney captures the undercurrent of unresolved issues and the potential for explosive confrontations felt achingly familiar. When the brothers finally clash, it's with a raw intensity that mirrors the big fights I've experienced with my siblings (I have a scar to prove it). These moments are when the novel feels most alive and emotionally authentic.

My reviews at: https://judgemebymycover.substack.com

I’m gonna be honest here. I picked up this book more out of obligation than excitement. For better or for worse Sally Rooney is an extremely important author at the moment due to the frank way she writes about younger Millennials. There are others like her but Rooney is able to write about these experiences in a very relatable way that connects to a lot of readers. I am one of the few people who think that Rooney’s first novel Conversations With Friends was notably better than her follow-up Normal People, although both are quite strong. However, going into this novel I wasn’t expecting much due to how much I disliked her third book Beautiful World, Where Are You. While reading Beautiful World, I got this feeling that Rooney had totally peaked with Conversations With Friends and any magic she captured with that novel was gone.

For the first 150 pages of Intermezzo, my feelings stayed the same. Something just felt off. And then a switch flipped. The book went from mediocre to outright good. And it just continued to get better. I am not sure exactly what is so different between the first third of the book and the rest of it but I found myself having a blast. I reread passages just to enjoy the writing. I started to totally dig the characters. I cracked up at a few jokes. I got emotionally invested.

I’m really not sure what happened. On paper there is very little to differentiate the Sally Rooney work that I do like (all of Conversations with Friends, a good chunk of Normal People, the final 300 pages of Intermezzo) from the writing of hers I dislike (parts of Normal People, all of Beautiful World, Where Are You, the first third of Intermezzo). Rooney is an author that has one subject matter that she really likes to stick to. Her characters are by-and-large middle-class people in their 20s and 30s in Dublin. They are often very messed up mentally and have struggles in relationships that stem from their mental health issues.

And yet there feels like a marked difference when Rooney just lets the character’s thoughts on the page as opposed to their actions. Rooney’s writing style is fairly weird in that a lot of it is just stream-of-consciousness and that doesn’t work all that well when describing physical actions. If there is one thing I wish she’d do it’s to describe her sex scenes in less detail. I get why the scenes are in there. Rooney’s books are far more character-based than plot-based and any good character-based book needs to have well-defined relationships. Some of these relationships are bound to be sexual in nature. Rooney is putting these scenes in for a reason, the problem is that the scenes don’t work well with her writing style.

Maybe that’s what’s different between the first third and the final two thirds of this book. Rooney is genuinely good at writing a few types of scenes, but there is nothing she is quite as good at as getting in the mind of someone who is having a mental breakdown, and there are so many mental breakdowns in the final 300 pages of this book. These scenes are written with a perfect amount of sympathy and restraint. I think that’s why Rooney is so popular among a certain generation of readers. She just gets what the human mind looks like during periods of crisis and that’s a legitimate talent that not many writers have.

This review itself has itself been kind of stream-of-consciousness but overall I can say I’m a much bigger Sally Rooney fan than I was when I started it, and for that I’m grateful.

As usual, Sally Rooney gifts us an intricate, intellectual, compelling, and tender insight into the complexity of human relationships, and the blurred lines between them. Taking the ordinary and evincing something profound. New this time was the stream of consciousness writing style, which I found immersive. And so clever the way the writing styles dramatically switched throughout with shifting perspectives, giving the characters depth and tactility.

Everyone say thank you Sally

4.5 oh yeah easily my favorite rooney. good stuff good stuff

First thoughts are this is not an author for me, I can respect that people enjoy the writing and can get past the no “””” but this is not for me. And that’s okay.

I get her story’s are character studies essentially and there isn’t supposed to really be plot and I enjoy the idea of that, and in the future hope to find an author that writes that and I enjoy ~ not today though lol. I liked the chess talk and the ending was nice~ and this is probably just me but the last quarter I was really hoping a character would die. I would have gave it more love possibly.

I felt the older brother was more developed and the younger was a bit lacking, I needed more from his sections of the book. Also didn’t like how the women were such a crutch for the men in this book like I get that’s how a lot of relationships end up going in reality but bleh.

If you like her other works it’s worth the read but if not this is not entirely worth it.

Ne znam da li više mrzim Pitera, Ivana, Sali Runi ili sebe što nisam batalila ovo na 20% umesto što sam se patila rekordna 34 dana.

definitely could've been worse? I dunno, is that mean to say? Overall, I can't deny Rooney's talent for writing. it's a craft, and she has honed that skill, alright! There were some parts I was definitely jiving with the creative prose and captivating character beats, but overall I was distracted by the overly loud question ringing in my ears: why? Why was I reading this, why was I interested in these characters and their sad lives, why was it written. I will never have the answers to those questions, but what I do have is another book read this year, so I can't be fully-mad.

Rooney's books must be consumed by audiobook for me, I cannot withstand her puncuation choices. JUST PUT A COMMA IN THERE, I'M BEGGING YOU