Intermezzo (International Edition) Paperback – International Edition, September 21, 2024

Families are complicated! To follow along with the intimate journey of these 2 brothers was heartbreaking and heartwarming. A great read.

While I really enjoyed Intermezzo, it wasn’t my favorite of Sally Rooney’s novels. For some context, Sally Rooney is my favorite contemporary author. Normal People definitely stands out as her best novel, although I also loved Beautiful World. For Intermezzo, while the character development was still strong, I found the characters to be way less likable, almost to the point where reading the book became challenging. Ivan, while at times, endearing, comes across as insensitive and overly stubborn, with no desire to grow or improve. While the novel has some very touching moments and was beautifully written, the character’s made it difficult for me to love the book.

I don’t relate well to this style. The book was just ok yo me. Not the best drawn characters or story. I do know many live Sally Rooney but I haven’t really gotten into any of her books. This was a book club pick by a friend so I finished but probably wouldn’t have otherwise.

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.

I'd been dimly aware of the extravagant attention lavished on Sally Rooney's "millennial Irish" novels, but hadn't taken the plunge until "Intermezzo," which intrigued me with its theme of a troubled relationship between two brothers. The origin story, of course, is the Biblical tale of Cain and Abel, and though it's been updated often enough (notably in Steinbeck's "East of Eden"), I can't think of another woman writer who's addressed it head-on. Rooney's brothers are ten years apart in age. Peter, in his early 30s, is an accomplished lawyer with a polished, cerebral facade that can't conceal a well of dissatisfaction and loneliness. Ivan, in his early 20s, is a former chess prodigy - socially awkward, marginally employed, transparently vulnerable They've been recently orphaned by the death of their father (their mother long since vacated the marriage) and their differences are sharply drawn in their response to that loss: Ivan, open-hearted in his grief; Peter, bottled up with unfocused anger. A patronizing, unfeeling remark from Peter sends Ivan into a filial rage ("I"ve always hated you") and whatever ties they once had seem irrevocably cut. Can the breach be healed? Can Peter and Ivan find their way to the sibling love they've long tried to bury? For help, Rooney calls upon three angels - or rather, three women of different capacities who are romantically attached to the brothers. Curiously, she is better at excavating the male psyches than the female ones, which become over-determined as agents of healing,-as fixed as Ivan’s chess pieces. Ivan's discreet, grateful relationship with an older woman who becomes his compassionate bedmate is beautifully, deeply brought to life. Peter's incompatible romances - one with a promiscuous, much younger free-spirit who satisfies hie need for sexual dominance, the other with his former, still loyal fiancee, who is sexually incapacitated after a horrible accident - are exhaustively but less convincingly described. In an afterword, Rooney acknowledges such literary models as Henry James and James Joyce, and her narrative aspires to the psychological depth of the former and the sensual immediacy of the latter. But it's an odd fit. I read "Intermezzo" with intermittent pleasure and a growing sense that it was all heading toward a rather too-neat conclusion. Sure enough, that's where it finally arrives, bountiful with good feeling for all involved and, for my taste, a bit too much moral uplift.

It’s a different style of writing for sure . Took me a min but it was worth it . Takes you on a journey and at the same time it’s sensual and coy. Deliberate and intriguing.

Thought provoking and beautifully written, an introspective one rarely sees on romantic and family relationships, sex and grief, told from the male perspective by a female writer. I am impressed (now I want to know what my husband thinks of it…unfortunately, my book club is all women.)