Intermezzo: A Novel

This book became dear to me.just finished reading this book. The whole story has a melancholy tone. It’s about two brothers ivan and peter and how they navigate their lives and grief after losing their father. It explores the complexities of the sibling relationships and love life. At the beginning i just found ivan so relatable and adorable and disliked peter. But as the story progresses we get to know how that peter is just exhausted and all alone. Personally i found many situations and the emotions relatable and familiar, it resonated with me deeply. Halfway through i became fond of the characters. I became more interested in peters pov. And sure at times I didn’t like ivans thoughts and actions especially towards his brother, but i understood How he just became an adult and figuring out the complexities of life. At the end i ended up rooting for peter and just wanted to give him a hug. The some of the events in this story happened in my life and also having similar sibling dynamic, i really was invested in this book till the end. I just wanted two more chapters at the end, because i felt the story just ended abruptly, although not dissatisfying. I definitely recommend it!

the book is of good quality, it was a bit chipped on the spine but otherwise alright.

Go blind for this and have a wonderful time

If “no thoughts, just vibes-but-only-if-you-catch-it-at-exactly-the-right-phase-of-your-life” were a book, it would be Intermezzo. Rooney’s Intermezzo doesn’t so much tell a story as it breathes it - laying bare a narrative that is less about what happens and more about what lingers, aches, and pulses beneath the surface. After beautiful people, which unfortunately didn't do it for me, Rooney's writing sort of felt like the last thing I needed, but Intermezzo's blurb called out to me and I am glad I gave it a chance. At its centre, are two brothers, Ivan and Peter, trying to make sense of life after their father’s death. They hardly see each other and yet their connection, is felt in what’s left unsaid, in the distance between them and in their weight of shared childhood and history. Rooney avoids easy emotion and chooses to gravitate towards the quietness and apparent stillness of it. The narration doesn’t exactly shift fluidly between the brothers’ minds and you can feel the sharp divide. Peter’s sections are chaotic, his thoughts rushing at times and sometimes scattered, tangled in heartbreak and self-doubt. Ivan’s, on the other hand, are deliberate and steady, his tone and emotions carefully restrained, as if he’s offering pieces of himself to the world in measured doses, unsure how much he can afford to give away. Ronney adapts this narrative style to reflect who they are at their core - Peter, adrift in the wreckage of lost love and a crumbling sense of self, and Ivan, quietly grappling with uncertainty behind a façade of control, finding refuge in the calculated world of chess and the complexities of his relationship. Unlike stories of familial grief, where mourning unfolds linear, Intermezzo moves in a more fragmented, elliptical way. Ivan and Peter cross paths only occasionally, their sorrow running side by side, rarely intersecting yet it is manifested beneath their concealed lives. Intermezzo left me not with answers, rather it was a novel I lived within, if only briefly..

I am in a week of writing style of this book. In actuality the timeline described are about 6 months but the way she joins backstories, their past, relationship, dreams, future, aspirations etc is something I loved about the book. The language is simple and relatable. One could easily imagine in Peter or Ivan shoes. The book generates so many emotions that compels you to take deep breath and feel. The climax is so well writen, I was rooting for Peter and Ivans union and was waiting to feel that happy moment I have become a fan of the author and bought normal people

A little damage to the spine but good quality. No ink spillage or creased pages. The paper is nice and thick. Floppy book.

Sally Rooney's skill in depicting emotion, confusion, yet hope is at its best in her latest novel Intermezzo. Two brothers, a decade apart in age, experience the stress of a “throuple” relationship loving two women simultaneously, balancing love with a sense of duty, while the younger brother falls into a romance with a woman fourteen years older. The dialogue is current, fragmented and real, illustrating the doubts of one brother and the expectation of social disapproval of the other. Add to this the overshadow of the recent death of the father, the consequent conflict between the two brothers, create an intriguing backdrop to the intermezzo between the scenes to its ultimate finale. Enjoyable, teasing and recommended.

Good quality,love it.

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.

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