Aside From The Fact That They Are Brothers, Peter And Ivan Koubek Seem To Have Little In Common.

I recently finished reading Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. This is my book club's November book.

POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT

  Rating: 3.25/5 stars

"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."

Four hundred and forty-eight pages of men taking zero accountability for their actions and using women as their emotional crutches. So I guess you could say it's realistic?

Unfortunately, this book dragged in places, and I reached my limit for melancholy navel-gazing. That's not to say I didn't get something out of it. I still really enjoyed the character portraits. Rooney is good at taking fucked up relationship dynamics and exploring them up, down and inside out. Here she looks not only at complex romantic entanglements, but also the relationship between two very different brothers who are struggling to connect with each other and manage their grief after their father's death.

I like that she dramatically changes writing style when she moves between Peter and Ivan’s perspectives, reflecting their personalities in Peter’s rapid fire, often meandering, thoughts and Ivan’s more precisely-articulated inner narrative.

However, I never fully enjoyed the inclusion of Margaret’s perspective in Ivan’s chapters and still can't really understand the decision behind it. All it did was give us less page time with Ivan, making Peter, ultimately, the more developed character and the more interesting POV to read.

I also felt like Peter's ending was too easily wrapped up. He's in a very complex situation and spends the whole book moping (some of it justified; some of it less so) but then solutions just seem to start falling into his lap without any growth on his part.

Check out Intermezzo, and discover the different dynamic between siblings.

Happy Reading :)