Book Review: Sally Rooney's latest novel, Intermezzo, explores unacknowledged grief

Ivan and Peter Koubek's father just died, but neither of them seems willing to talk about it much, let alone with each other. After all, the two brothers aren't even friends.

Peter, the oldest by a decade, feels sorry for his awkward 22-year-old brother, a competitive chess player whose skills in the game haven't done much to boost his social skills or self-esteem. But after meeting Margaret, an older woman emerging from the shadow of her own crisis, Ivan's life begins to blossom – and the same can't be said for Peter. A human rights lawyer – once optimistic, now jaded – Peter is self-medicating and can't stop sabotaging his relationships with Naomi, a wry, carefree student, and Slyvia, his former flame and longtime love.

The days after a tragedy are often difficult to cope with and “Intermezzo”, the fourth novel by The Irish author Sally Rooney, is a portrait of grief that is not fully internalized. In her sharp, intimate style, Rooney struggles through the tangled emotions that follow tragedy: grief, certainly, but also relief and longing, guilt and joy, all on the verge of transformation.

When sketching the contours of her characters, Rooney switches between perspectives, as she did in her last novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You. Her dialogue, typically simple and without quotation marks, gives her prose a special musicality.

As Peter's mind unravels from the pills, Rooney's closed third-person voice dances across the line between spoken and unspoken, blurring into long, drawn-out paragraphs as he wanders the streets of Dublin – meandering sentences punctuated by sharp staccatos of the self-pity.

Ivan, meanwhile, follows the well-trodden path of other stunted men, intelligently methodical but rambling, tapping into emotions with inadequate words. It's in these almost cases that Rooney shines. She extracts almost broken emotions that the conscience never fully feels and releases them from reality for our voyeuristic pleasure.

When Ivan first meets Margaret, Rooney notes that he has “an involuntary mental image of kissing her on the mouth: not even really an image, but an idea of ​​an image, a kind of realization that it might be possible at some point.” will imagine that.” later point.”

After her first encounter with Ivan, Margaret herself is struck by the uncanny feeling that “life has slipped from its bonds.” “It doesn’t mean anything,” she thinks, then quickly corrects her course. “That’s not true: it means something, but the meaning is unknown.”

This is often the meter of metamorphosis, the everyday whirlwind of emotions that flash past, illegible and unrealized, until they inevitably burst, fully formed and so completely overwhelming that they can no longer be contained. And it is in this intermediate state, reserved and cautious, that Rooney locates her novel – think of the title.

Intermezzo, an unexpected move in chess that interrupts the typical sequence of exchanges, represents a risk that upends the perceived balance of the game and raises the stakes.

In the tense, chaotic contradictions of communal grief, Rooney weaves a beautiful overall picture.

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