I have heard so much about Intermezzo. About all Sally Rooney books in general. Intermezzo is my first, but I’m just not sure if it was the writing style, but I am conflicted. Do I read another one just to make sure? Keep reading this book review of Intermezzo for my full thoughts.
Summary
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.
Review
Intermezzo has the elements of books I should like. There are complex sibling relationships, touches of chess, and family dynamics which haunt us even when they’re gone. But it was a rough start. There were no quotation marks and while I did get used to this after a while, it definitely threw me for a loop. Is that how every Sally Rooney book is? On one hand, it immersed you in the character introspection and made you question what someone had said. But on the other hand, this combined with large paragraphs of text was just a challenging experience. I really felt like I had to work for it. Maybe that was the intended effect?
But it just meant I had a hard time sinking into the pulse of the chapter. Normally books, in my opinion, could use more introspection, but Intermezzo is not one of those. There is a lot of introspection. And while Intermezzo was chunkier than I thought, it feels very much like a slice of life. We witness a moment, but there isn’t necessarily a hook of action which keeps us reading. All in all, I don’t mind all these separate elements, but together it just took me out of reading. What did I like?
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In general, I appreciated the way Intermezzo explores character dynamics. What happens when we think the world, society, our family, will judge our relationship choices? How do we let that reflect on us and on our own visions of ourselves? Do we let those fears, those expectations, end something before it even began? Intermezzo is character driven through and through. And so if you do like those kind of books, especially ones with relationships we have to examine, then you might enjoy Intermezzo. For me, it just was a bit too slow, and too long, for me to buddy read it with my book club. If I had been able to read at full speed, maybe I would have had a different experience!
Find Intermezzo on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Bookshop.org, Blackwells, & Libro. fm.