Intermezzo: A Novel

In her 2022 T.S. Eliot lecture at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin on the centenary of the publication of James Joyce's "Ulysses", Sally Rooney traced the origins of the novel in English back to women, not men, writing in the 18th century. This wonderfully erudite lecture published in the Paris Review is available online, and I recommend it to the attention of those who think Ms. Rooney is not a " serious" writer. She is indeed a serious writer, and "Intermezzo" is vivid proof of that. She said in an interview that she had learned much from the novels of Jane Austen and Henry James. That same moral seriousness is present in this book, which is a beautiful narrative of both internal thoughts and feelings and external actions and deeds, especially sexual deeds, in the interlinked lives of 2 brothers and 3 women in their lives. Sally Rooney used the term " relational novel" to describe books centered on the connections men and women sometimes succeed and sometimes fail to establish between each other. She then went on to show that "Ulysses" is such a relational novel. Her novel recalls not only Joyce but also Virginia Woolf. If you like the writers I have mentioned, you will love "Intermezzo". In a recent interview with the New York Times, Sally Rooney was asked about "big" issues like climate change and why she didn't focus on such topics rather than the relationships of Irish millenials in 21st century Dublin. (This is NOT an American novel please, and its characters and sensitivities are thoroughly Irish.) Ms. Rooney said that yes these larger issues are important, but that people had to live and needed a reason to live and their connections with other people on the micro not the macro scale provide them with hope and motivation to live. I love this book and I especially love the ending whose resolution of the storyline was as powerful and meaningful as the endings of Shakespeare's beautiful romantic comedies like "A Midsummer Night's Dream". The *end* of a story is the most important part. What a dreadful feeling when the author drops the ball at this crucial moment. Have no fear, gentle readers; when you reach the end of this wonderful book, you will be uplifted and you will feel that the hours spent on this reading journey have been well worth your valuable time.

Personal and moving novel about grief, family, and love. The writing style is a bit different--no quotes with dialogue and very stream of consciousness. Character-driven novel centering around two brothers. Enjoyed it and will read more from this author.

I liked the book but the writing style was a challenge for me. I realize it when I read Peters story it was him talking to himself, but it was difficult to follow due to the punctuation, run on sentences and crazy self talk. In the end the story is about healing and family.

Loved it, the character's made me mad but that's life. We always say the wrong thing & act in a way we know we shouldn't. She captures life as it really is. I appreciate that on her writing.

Sally Rooney has done something remarkable in restoring a sense of high seriousness to the romance novel. Having read some of the commentary in the press, I was intrigued to learn, among other things, that the two central characters in the book were both male. Even highly accomplished novelists often have trouble showing the perspective of the other sex, and so I wondered how well she would succeed. A little bit to my surpise, she did it as well as any man, in ways almost a bit too well. The brothers Peter and Ivan are depicted intensely in all their psychological complexity. The three major female characters - Sylvia, Peter's wife; Naomi, Peter's girlfriend; Margaret, Ivan's older girlfriend - are also meant to be complex, but they seem more abstract and less vivid than the men. At the beginning of Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann, the deluded Hoffmann says that his imagined girlfriend is three women in one: an innocent, a courtesan, and an artist. These are the three major male fantasies, at least in literature and the arts, since at least about the start of the nineteenth century. The lineaments of these, though adapted and a bit disguised, can be discerned respectively in Sylvia, Naomi, and Margaret. The prose of the novel is cryptic, fast moving. It is not only filled with astute psychological observations but also philosophic meditations on the nature of love, such as we find in classic authors such as William Shakespeare and Jane Austen. I became very caught up in the novel and expected to rate it a five (maybe even five plus), but I was very disappointed in the ending. Nothing is actually resolved, from the personal rivalries to the romantic uncertainties. That is not necessarily a flaw in itself, and it may be that these are unresolvable, in which case the novel could end on a tragic note. Instead, having vented their conflicts and resentments, all of the characters are reconciled without any resolution. This not only impresses me as unbelievable. It also senselessly dissipates the drama that Rooney has build up over the previous 400 or so pages. Love ceases to be an existential crisis and becomes a psychological problem to be solved by a therapist, a counselor, or an advice columnist.

Wow. This one was deep, thought-provoking, painful, and occasionally depressing. But I honestly can't think of a book I have read recently that more fully explored the feelings and thoughts of its main characters. I felt like I really knew Ivan and Peter, from the inside out. The stream of consciousness chapters for Peter did not bother me at all. The sentences (or often sentence fragments) were short and punctuated. After the first chapter like this, I stopped noticing. This book is one of the best I've read so far this year. I wish I had read it with a book club, because I really want to talk about it. There were so many interesting themes explored -- love, loss, the role of sex in relationships, societal norms, fitting in -- told from the perspectives of two flawed but very human characters.

This is my first read of any Rooney novel. I don't know her normal subject matter (if she has one) or if this is her normal writing style. That took a while for me to get used to. It’s choppy, staccato, train of thought, often incoherent - more so for the Peter POV chapters than the ones that are Ivan or Margaret driven. The lack of quotation marks challenges the readers on who is saying what (vs thinking) and to whom. The story is somewhat compelling, but not always convincing. While Rooney has the younger brother, Ivan, as neurodivergent and on the spectrum, she doesn't make the same assessment about Peter (the older brother), which could be a truism. But he's a man in need of mental health services. Ivan seems more the mature grown-up one and his dialogue rarely shows signs of the divergent status he's made out to be in the beginning. Sometimes the writing goes into romance novel territory, which is not appealing to me. Again, first Rooney I've read, so maybe that's her style. And as with so many novels, especially the 400+ pagers, everything usually wraps up far too easily and neatly. Sometimes with zero hurdles or conflict. I thought that true here as well. I think the writing is usually very good, the storylines too. I think the grief the characters are experiencing comes out far too late, but that's me. If you can work with the writing style, I think you won't struggle with the length of the book.

Intermezzo is a novel in which the plot is much less important than the writing. It tells the story of two brothers, ages 22 and 32, who have recently lost their father, their primary parent, and their significant others. In wonderful detail, the novel shares the brothers' introspection about themselves, their relationship with each other, and their efforts to develop relationships with significant others. The younger brother's partner receives equal treatment, perhaps because the younger brother is committed to her. In contrast, we know the older brother's partners only as they are reflected through his thoughts and experiences, perhaps because the nature of the older brother's commitment remains under development at the end of the novel. The writing is beautiful, using different styles to reflect the thoughts of the three primary characters. I highly recommend Intermezzo.

Book came in creased and with folds on the corners and stains

Entendo porque dizem que é o melhor livro da Sally Rooney! Realmente é uma história que não dá pra parar de ler.

Intermezzo is the first Sally Rooney novel I’ve read. Given the criticisms Rooney receives (amongst the accolades), I was relieved to find it easy to read and surprised to find it unputdownable. It wasn’t perfect of course, as to be expected of a young writer’s fourth novel. I’ll start with my criticisms, before coming to, for me, the most compelling character in the book: Peter. * Intermezzo is written from the alternating and intermingling points of view of three characters: Peter, Ivan, and Margaret, and includes long sections of stream of consciousness. This is an established literary style, but is difficult to pull off technically, because clearly nobody thinks in sustained verbal soliloquies in real life. The writer has to invent a language in which to verbalise consciousness. In this book, for example, Peter often thinks in jumbled phrases and truncated sentences, conveying how confused and stressed he is. Ivan, who may be coded as autistic, thinks in clearer, detached, analytical language, which makes his thought process easier to read. Rooney handles all this very well, on the whole. But it seemed to me that as the novel went on, Ivan became less and less “autistic”, and that separate streams of consciousness became less distinct from each other, as if all three viewpoint characters had developed a similar thinking style–that style being Rooney’s default style, maybe. This made Ivan an unconvincing character for me, because I don’t buy that such a mentally rigid individual could blossom so rapidly into a sensitive, thoughtful lover. Because Intermezzo depends so much on point-of-view, I felt that Rooney left herself with no way of describing the external world objectively. It felt to me that as soon as she attempted to do so, the writing dropped off a cliff. For example, when Ivan and Margaret went for a walk along a lane, Rooney ended the section with this: “Ivan says nothing, just goes on walking beside her in the cold, bright air. From the field beside the laneway, a small sturdy sheep watches them passing, its dirty fleece silvered with rainfall, its face velvet black. Golden-green fields stretching out into the faint blue distance. Limitless clear air and light everywhere around them, filled with the sweet liquid singing of birds.” When Rooney tries this sort of stuff, she could, in my opinion, be any two-bit author. For me, it works neither as pathetic fallacy nor as an evocation of the Irish countryside. * OK, let me come to what blew my mind about this book: the character of Peter Koubek. I have to give Rooney credit for attempting to write that unsympathetic, socially irrelevant but concerning character, the struggling male. I identified so intensely with this poor man. He’s trapped in a situation, mainly of his own making, where he is the high-earning male, the leader, the purse-stringer, the buck–stops-here fixer and problem solver. And no-one realises, at least not till it’s almost too late (“Am I having a breakdown?”) that he’s falling apart inside. I’m not going to do the gammon moan that straight, “normal” white men are now the social victims. Because overall, men still earn more money, rise higher in most jobs, have more freedom, act more aggressively, more sexually irresponsibly, etc., etc. But Rooney, I think, is addressing the phenomenon of the secretly depressed male who, out of the blue, ends it all, without admitting his struggle, without anyone noticing his plight. Peter just can’t do anything right: he upsets, sometimes quite suddenly and dramatically, the people in his relationship circle. The thing is, he doesn’t mean to–he’s trying to do the right thing, but it always backfires. So he starts to despise himself; and it seems there's no way out. Yet Rooney’s portrait of him is balanced. She shows him again and again to be well-meaning and generous, for which no one gives him credit (nor does he expect any). They just see it as self-serving, manipulative; “waving your dick around”, as Naomi calls it after he comes to get her out of police custody. I wanted to write about Peter here, because as I read through the reviews for Intermezzo, I noticed that little account is taken of Peter. So he is being overlooked as a character just as he was by other people in the book, and for similar reasons. Several reviewers say they actively disliked him. Such is the fate of this kind of male, I guess. These days, particularly in literary circles and on social media, priority is given to women and minorities, such as LGBT, BAME, and to people with neurodivergence. Which is as it should be, of course, to help rebalance against the social advantages held by neurotypical, cis males. But I’m glad Rooney took the character of Peter on, and in such a nuanced way. I felt seen. These days, women are writing (and reading) more literary novels than men, who are increasingly sticking to genre, where men can still be heroes. So there’s a recent dearth of realistic books written from a male point of view. It could be said that, as a woman, Rooney can’t get every detail of male POV right. Sure. But if men aren’t going to do it in serious fiction, it’s wonderful that some female authors will. (Recently, Dolly Alderton, as well, wrote about a break-up from a male POV.) Thoughtful women know how important men are still, because they live with them, love them, make love with them; and they have sons, brothers, and fathers. The character of Peter moved me. I felt so anxious for him. Thank you, Sally Rooney.

Love the way is written, the stream of conscious, the description and dialogue, all intertwined. And the grief. The acceptance. The love.

Un grand livre qui est magnifique avec un courant de conscience, très précis et touchant. Belle histoire entre deux frères.