Sally Rooney's ‘Intermezzo’: Adulting through grief and love

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Thirty-two-year-old barrister Peter Koubek and his brother Ivan, a competitive chess player a decade his junior, share a crippling loss in Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo. Their father, who immigrated from Slovakia in the 1980s, dies of cancer, and the vacuum beneath the placid surface of their quotidian lives in Dublin and West Ireland becomes only too apparent.

Following the funeral, the brothers reconsider how they are living their lives and who they love; Peter is medicating himself to sleep while living an outwardly successful life, and Ivan is struggling to pay his rent and transition to adulthood. This grief is the immediate source of much introspection and attempted realignment of the status quo, but there are older wounds at play here. Both men know little about each other, and have had troubled relationships with their mother and her second family—which could explain their attraction to dignified, soothing beauties.

Desire becomes the lens through which they progress through this difficult passage in their young lives. Peter is caught between the brilliant academic Sylvia, an old yet elusive love, who suffers untold damage following an accident, and Naomi, a risk-taking 23-year-old college student and illegal squatter who is evicted. Ivan is drawn to troubled Margaret, an arts centre manager who is 14 years older and has an alcoholic ex-husband.