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Intermezzo
by Sally Rooney
faber & faber
In the game of chess, an intermezzo is an unexpected move – a departure from the obvious course – that requires an immediate response from the opponent.
In Sally Rooney’s story set in Dublin, we meet two poles-apart brothers mourning the death of their father. Ivan, 22, is a loner, uncomfortable socially. Ivan is a competitive chess player, a child prodigy, but since his father’s illness his chess accomplishments have flatlined. His older brother, Peter, is the complete opposite. Peter is 32. He’s a high achieving lawyer, has a large social circle, is financially secure and is used to being right. Except that since his Dad died everything, everything seems to be going wrong.
Peter is medicating himself, drinking too much and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women – his first-love and soulmate, Sylvia and Naomi, a much younger, carefree college student with a dubious income stream. Ivan, on the other hand, has met an older woman, Margaret – coming to terms with her own unhappy past – and is experiencing a kind of joy previously unfathomable to him.
In a book about moves – both chess moves and interpersonal ones, both right and wrong – the title becomes more and more relevant. I loved this read so much. Its deep and tender and moving. You really get into the heads of the characters, feel their pain, rue their mistakes and WILL them to make the “right” move next time!
“What’s fascinating about Rooney’s more recent attempts is how attuned she is to every social tightrope that constrains what we might have imagined would be free adulthood . . . There’s something brilliant and refreshing in Rooney’s choice to follow the private love affairs of two siblings once so closely connected . . . It’s a pleasure, this time, to get under the skin and into the compassionate private realities of these brothers who misperceive each other as villains.”― The Washington Post
“Wise, resonant and witty . . . There is so much restraint and melancholy profundity in her prose that when she allows the flood gates to open, the parched reader is willing to be swept out to sea . . . Rooney has an exquisite perceptiveness and a zest for keeping us reading . . . Intermezzo wears its heart on its sleeve.”― The New York Times
“The formal experiments are never idle but always at the service of a desire for emotional precision, for a more satisfactory rendering of the boundless complexity of the inner life . . . It is no small part of Rooney’s achievement in her latest novel that she portrays physical desire with tact and tenderness, without giving in to soft-focus sentimentalism . . . This bold, adventurous and captivating novel is a major addition to a body of work that never fails to surprise and engage.”― The Irish Times
“Intermezzo is exquisite . . . It’s as tender and lovely as you could ask for, and beneath the elegant rise and fall of Rooney’s oceanic sentences, the waters go deep.”― Vox
“Intermezzo is perfect―truly wonderful―a tender, funny page-turner about the derangements of grief, and Rooney’s richest treatment yet of messy romantic entanglements . . . She leans fully into her gifts here: more characters, more complication, ‘more life,’ as Margaret thinks . . . Is there a better novelist at work right now?”― The Observer