Review: Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

SiriusBook Reviews / C Reviews / C Reviews Category / C- ReviewsLiterary fictionNo Comments

An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

I GOT THE BOOK FROM THE LIBRARY.  SPOILERS IN THE REVIEW

Review:

Dear Sally Rooney,

Unfortunately your book mostly did not work for me.

Readers please bear with me, obviously I realize that this is a book by a bestselling writer and many people love her works. I will always have a chip on my shoulder that I as an ESL speaker should not be critiquing the writing of someone who writes literary fiction and who is so well known, but I have no problem stating that this book did not work for me, or should I say mostly did not work.

So, basically as the blurb tells you, two brothers lost their father and the younger one was the one who lived with him and they are grieving (apparently so, because even though it was obvious by implication I wish the actual grief was shown earlier than it actually was in the book).

The older brother cannot decide with whom he wants to be – his young girlfriend Naomi or his former love Sylvia and he keeps going back and forth and they keep hurting each other and having a lot of sex with each other and there is A LOT OF ANGST FOR MOST OF THE BOOK. He is angsting about what he should do and whom he is hurting more and whom he really loves.

Guess what? Both of his women tell him how to solve this situation early enough in the book specifically none of them minds if he keeps seeing them both, but NO THE ANGST CONTINUES BECAUSE OTHERWISE THERE WOULD BE NO STORY.

Listen, people grieve in different ways, I completely understand and have no issues with that but no, the writer did not convince me that Peter’s self induced dilemma is somehow connected to his grief. I mean, just to be clear eventually we do see that he is in pain, but this “with whom to be” would have been part of his life decisions grief or no grief.

Yes, before you ask, the happy ending is that he is going to keep seeing them both. It certainly made sense for the characters, I am just not sure why this took so long to resolve.

And then there is Peter’s relationship with his brother Ivan, whom I liked better throughout the story (this does not mean that he is a perfect character but I had less desire to shake him over and over while I was reading). Also, apparently being awkward in communication with his brother and other people means that you are on the autistic spectrum now? He could be for all I know, it just felt like that was a label thrown at the character nothing more.

There is also a building relationship for Ivan where there is also an age difference dilemma, and also angst and a lot of sex, but somehow I felt that was a little better handled.

There is also a happy ending, which I liked, but my main feeling was thank God this ended. C/C-

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