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A Novel
by Sally Rooney
Book Reviewed by: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.
These are the central themes of the novel: mourning and, above all, regret. A death sheds light on the life of the deceased, but also on the lives of those close to him; it invites them to question their past. The siblings are suddenly aware of the brevity of life and how disappointing it can be. Intermezzo is not Rooney's most enjoyable novel, but it is perhaps her most mature. The themes are, and so is the narrative style. Yet when you close the book—and sometimes you need to close it—you don't wonder what Peter and Ivan are up to, as you might have done with Marianne and Connell from Normal People (2018) or Frances from Conversations with Friends (2017): mastery has annihilated the attractive innocence of those early characters...continued
Full Review
(776 words)
(Reviewed by Alicia Calvo Hernández).
On Saturday, September 21, 2024, more than 500 people gathered at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, located a few meters from St. Stephen's Green, a setting in Sally Rooney's new novel Intermezzo. The Irish author, one of the most influential figures on the contemporary literary scene, greeted the audience with a warm smile and a hand over her heart in a gesture of gratitude to those attending the presentation of her latest novel.
Sally Rooney has become a global phenomenon. She could be defined as a literary Taylor Swift: the publication of her books has caused bookstores to open early to accommodate long lines of people eager to get a copy; limited and autographed editions of her works sell for hundreds; her fans, mainly young women...
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