Intermezzo
A Novel
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4.1 • 603 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | A National Indie Bestseller
Short-listed for the An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year | Nominated for the DUBLIN Literary Award
Named a Best Book of the Year and a Critics’ Pick by The New York Times | Named an Essential Read by The New Yorker | Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, Financial Times, Vogue, The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, Vox, The Times (UK), Apple Books, and more | A USA Today, People, and Associated Press Top 10 Book of the Year | One of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2024 | One of Chicago Public Library’s Favorite Books of the Year
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this powerhouse tale of love, loss, and longing, the masterful Sally Rooney keeps everyone in check. Siblings Peter and Ivan Koubek couldn’t be more different. Separated by just about every aspect of life, they’ve never had a close relationship. But after their father’s death, the cracks become irreparable chasms. Oddball struggling chess prodigy Ivan falls hard for the not-yet-divorced Margaret, while older brother Peter attempts to balance relationships with his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, who suffers from chronic pain after a car accident, and free-spirited college student and occasional sex worker Naomi. Rooney’s modernist, poetic, and fractured writing about the directionless and depressed lawyer Peter feels intentionally fuzzy, like his head after another sleepless night fueled by medication and alcohol. This contrasts jaggedly with the giddy and lucid rush of Ivan and Margaret’s blooming love story, with all the awkward self-awareness and developing emotional intelligence you’d expect from a Rooney character. A raw and unfiltered deep dive into family ties and grief, Intermezzo is a full symphony.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Rooney returns with a boldly experimental and emotionally devastating story of estrangement (after Beautiful World, Where Are You). After their father dies, brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek drift further apart. Peter, 32, is a depressed Dublin lawyer torn between his college girlfriend, Sylvia, who broke up with him with after she suffered a disabling accident six years earlier, and 23-year-old Naomi, a sometime sex worker. Ivan, 22, is a socially inept pro chess player whose wunderkind status is in doubt when he meets and falls for 36-year-old near-divorcée Margaret at a tournament. Peter's reflexive disapproval of the age gap in Ivan and Margaret's relationship causes a permanent rift, and Rooney crosscuts between their perspectives as they ruminate on their father's death and their complicated romances. The novel's deliberate pacing veers from the propulsiveness of Normal People and the deep character work contrasts with the topicality of Beautiful World, but in many ways this feels like Rooney's most fully realized work, especially as she channels the modernist styles of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Underlining Peter's rudderlessness, she writes, "Lamplight. Walking her to the library under the trees. Live again one day of that life and die. Cold wind in his eyes stinging like tears. Woman much missed." Moreover, her focus on Peter and Ivan's complicated fraternal bond pays enormous dividends. Even the author's skeptics are liable to be swept away by this novel's forceful currents of feeling.
Customer Reviews
My first Rooney book
This is really 4 & 1 & 1/2 stars—I found the book wordy at times and I couldn't really buy-into Sylvia's malady—it's pretty weak. I love what I consider to be Rooney's primary theme of the acceptance of nonconformity, in this book being the deconstructing of rigid concepts of what “family”, or relationships in general, should be in order to be considered acceptable. Ridding society of such rigid social standards is a step toward opening ourselves up to accepting those who are “othered” as 'ab'average rather than 'ab'normal. Who among us is actually “normal” anyway"? Who knows what normal is? And who wants to be considered merely “average”? Variety is the spice of life. I think I'll be reading more of her books . . .
All Mixed Up
I had always considered reading Sally Rooney’s books to be a guilty pleasure. However, after reading “Intermezzo”, I realized that there’s a deeper layer to her novels beyond the surface-level themes of sex, drugs, and messy relationships. This novel explores the concept of what we want others to be versus accepting them for who they truly are. Through the journey of two estranged brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, we learn valuable lessons about self-acceptance and the complexities of human relationships.
The relationship between the Koubek brothers captures a core reason why I keep coming back to Rooney’s novels. Her ability to delve into human behavior through the brothers’ inner monologues, unsaid words, and spiraling actions is truly remarkable. Rooney has a knack for capturing the chasms of misunderstanding that exist between people, mirroring everyday interactions with uncanny accuracy.
Moreover, if you have a sibling, this book will resonate with you on a deeper level. Rooney uses the brothers as a representation of the two sides of the human brain, each with its own desires and approaches to life. The strained relationship between them mirrors the torn nature of a confused soul, and when their differences overlap, violent reactions are inevitable.
Rooney’s true masterstroke in “Intermezzo” lies in her exploration of how the lens through which we interpret the world skews our language and ultimately impacts our ability to communicate and connect. She delves into the question of how we make sense of our lives when a major event shatters our preconceived notions of the future. All of this is set against the backdrop of contemporary social issues such as equity, agency, abuse, and modern relationship structures. “Intermezzo” may be Rooney’s finest work yet, and it is undoubtedly a worthwhile read.
Repetitive
From the start to the end, this story made almost no progress and or character development. The descriptions were also repetitive. I felt like I was just reading the same thing over and over.