Overwrought and under-imagined
He’s had sex but has never had intimacy and doesn’t expect he ever will
Each time I picked up Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, I got caught in the feelings the author’s words elicited. These were not good feelings. They were feelings of acute loneliness, painfully but exquisitely drawn out to such a point that I had no option but to close the book after a few pages or shatter into a million pieces.
Each time I put the book down, I swore I would not read it any longer. It was just too much. Too intense. It made my heart hurt. It needed more from me than I had the emotional capacity to give.
But each day, I’d be consumed with wanting to know what was happening in the lives of Ivan and Peter, the two protagonists of the book. And so, a month later, by dint of reading just a few pages a day, here is my review.
Intermezzo begins with the funeral of Peter and Ivan’s father, where the two brothers meet again after years. They haven’t been close since Ivan’s teens, when his childhood adoration of his much older brother morphed into antagonism. Now Peter is a barrister, worldly and sophisticated, while chess champion Ivan hasn’t been doing well lately and suffers from the social awkwardness associated with genius.
Both men are desperately lonely in their own ways. Ivan has only ever felt loved by his father and his dog, which he cannot keep in his rented flat. He’s had sex but has never had intimacy and doesn’t expect he ever will. Peter has had what Ivan wants, but that relationship fell apart when his girlfriend fell sick with a condition in which sex causes pain. Sylvia let Peter go and he now has a much younger girlfriend, Naomi.
Suddenly Ivan finds love and intimacy. With a woman even older than Peter. A woman with her own problems and fears. Peter, meanwhile, falls into a pattern in which he switches between Naomi and Sylvia. As soap opera-like as this sounds however, there’s no blatant drama. Peter and Ivan simply live their everyday lives, their thoughts carrying their stories.
These thoughts though, are presented in such forensic detail that no reader of the book can escape the pain the two men feel deep in their souls; pain that, I have no doubt, every person on the planet feels; pain that most people will do almost anything to avoid.
And this is why, much as I appear to extoll the virtues of this book, one thought beats staccato-like in my brain: I will never read Sally Rooney again. Because this book? It hurt.
Intermezzo
By Sally Rooney
Faber & Faber
pp. 448; Rs 699