Intermezzo: a review
so I think this book, Intermezzo, is about very messy things. identity vs. role confusion, intimacy vs. isolation. from how I interpret this book, unconditional love strikes me as a concept that it serves. between lovers, brothers.
this book navigates the tension between wanting love, but questioning its longevity or stability, especially when characters feel unworthy or undeserving of love because of circumstance or qualities they cannot change. characters in this book tend to push other people away, or presume what other people would want by default. this, is not something the book really emphasizes. more so what i picked up on, from a third party’s point of view looking at how the characters go through life.
the dynamic of pushing people away because of a sense of personal inadequacy is striking, because it comes from a place of self-protection rather than a lack of feeling. I think these characters, especially Sylvia and Margaret, are convinced that sparing their loved ones (Peter and Ivan) the burden of their flaws, they’re protecting the purity of love itself. and in a sense, this type of “purity” almost similar to the unbounded discussion on Fascist aesthetics in pursuit of purity that two characters have briefly later in the book. this purity runs right against the concept of what love actually means.
She sees him, starts to smile, waiting for him to cross. That feeling, he thinks: all he has wanted, all his life. To walk towards her, to reach her, to accept from her extended hand the warm paper cup of coffee. Thank you, he says. She says he’s welcome, and they’re smiling at one another, weakly, absurdly, or trying to smile. Shall we walk? she asks. He nods his head, please, and tentatively she lays her hand on his arm, and he repeats for some reason: Thank you.
She clears her throat, starts to tell him about a lecture she has to give on the historical context of literary modernism. As if to ask his advice. Only being kindly of course. Something about fascism he says and they go on walking, talking about fascist aesthetics and the modernist movement. Neoclassicism, obsessive fixation on ethnic difference, thematics of decadence, bodily strength and weakness. Purity or death.
Or love, in its unconditional sense. Love, for them, appears deeply conditional, defined by the terms of their own self-acceptance or lack-there-of. so in a sense, it’s not that unconditional love cannot be received, it is that the characters themselves withold themselves from falling into this vulnerability, making unconditional love an impossible concept in a world where people are always fluctuating in their feelings about themselves.
[She says,] wow, I think that might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. He exhales stupidly. Well, whatever, he says. His hand in hers still holding. You don’t want me to be grateful, you just want me to be happy, she repeats. I’m actually touched by that, like emotionally.
I think the detailing of the messy relationship between the Koubek brothers is chef’s kiss well done. it’s clear to me that at many points, neither of them are in the right, but valid in their feelings. like how the older Koubek assigns an idiotically high, practically moral degree of value to the concept of normality, and decides to look at his younger brother’s personality through that filter. Their relationship is portrayed delicately, realistically, and painfully. moments when neither of them can see the agonizing, sharp pain they’ve caused the other. vulnerabilities are gashed open, ending with pain, disappointment, and the bitter, lonely acceptance of that pain, and some awakening or rekindling of feelings.
Sally Rooney’s writing is a lot of soft self-awareness balanced with self-doubt, and sex for the emotional significance of it. introspection that is lingering, consuming, terminated. not totally enamoured with the age gap relationships that are a recurring theme, but in love with the fleeting pleasures and pretty profound realizations that emerge from silences.
