Tag: Sally Rooney

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney – Book

From a Google Image Search – Chicago Review of Books

Sally Rooney wrote Intermezzo, a story of two brothers, the Kubek brothers. An intermezzo is an intermission. We meet the younger Kubek brother first. Ivan is in his twenties, and he considers himself socially awkward. All his previous encounters have not gone well. He would become filled with anxiety and unable to approach social situations with an acceptable level of poise. He used his alone time, and it was considerable, to become an expert chess player. When he goes to a small town to play some chess against amateur players, he meets a beautiful 36-year-old woman, and he becomes involved with her. She does not find him the least bit awkward.

Peter is Ivan’s brother. He’s 35 and dating the 20-something Naomi. Peter is also involved with Sylvia, who he intended to marry. She was in a terrible accident, and although he still loves her, she can’t be there for Peter as a wife because she lives with constant pain.

Ivan and Peter recently lost their father and have not yet dealt with the pain of their loss. Their parents were divorced when Ivan was quite young, and the boys lived with their father. Since Peter is so much older than Ivan, he soon went off to college. There is that dynamic of who did Dad love best. Losing their father throws them temporarily off balance. Does the title refer to the time spent adjusting to this major change in their lives?

Rooney add in some Wittgenstein, a physicist I find quite abstract (pg. 399). Schrödinger’s box makes an appearance. Conversations between Sylvia, a professor, and Peter were too esoteric for me, a reflection, I imagine, of their level of intellectual sophistication, and a contrast to Naomi, who is needy, pretty, good company and surprisingly wise for someone so young but no intellectual. I usually like brain puzzles to unravel but this time I will have to go back over that part of the book to see if it is worth trying to grasp what these two characters are saying, or if the author is just showing off her erudition. (Sally Rooney wouldn’t do that.)

“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. Pound, Eliot. And on the other hand, Woolf, Joyce. Usefulness and specificity of fascism as a political typology in the present day. Aesthetic nullity of contemporary political movements in general. Related to, or just coterminous with, the almost instantaneous corporate capture of emergent visual styles. Everything beautiful immediately recycled as advertising. The freedom of that, or not. The necessity of an ecological aesthetics, or not. We need an erotics of environmentalism.” (pg. 393)

Since the story takes place in Dublin and small towns nearby, the odd sentence structure may reflect local dialect. Sentences often seem to be written backwards to avoid the use of conjunctions. Is this a Rooney thing or an Irish thing. I do not know. I found it interesting but not annoying.

“Terribly childish wish he feels once in his life to do as he’s told.” (pg. 410)

Sally Rooney gives us characters who seem like real people we could meet and know. Ivan and Margaret, Peter, Sylvia, and Naomi could be friends of ours. How they deal with traumas in their lives, how they deal with nontraditional relationships, how they come of age, regardless of their age in years; these are the interactions that hold our interest. If the ending seems a bit too happy, I don’t mind.

Normal People by Sally Rooney – Book

Normal People, by Sally Rooney

Two people, two Irish people, one male, one female, one from a wealthy family, one from a working class family, child of an unmarried mom are the focus of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People. Marianne’s and Connell’s worlds would not naturally connect, but in this case Connell’s mom cleans the house that Marianne’s family lives in. Connell’s mother is supportive and loving, doing all she can to provide for her son and to let him feel that he can talk to her and rely on her. Marianne’s father was abusive towards his daughter and his wife. Even with her father gone, Marianne’s family provides no haven of security. Her brother continues the abusive pattern of the father through a campaign of constant criticism and actual bullying which the mother refuses to intervene in. The absence of loving parents leaves Marianne alone to contend with her brother, although it is obvious she has no strategies to help her succeed against him.

Connell is a success in high school, despite his absent father. He is a football player and he’s an excellent student. Marianne uses awkwardness to keep everyone at bay in high school because she has no faith in her appearance or in her social skills. She does not try to look attractive or to make friends, but her isolation adds to her lack of self-esteem. She and Connell begin a secret and, at first, sexual relationship, but as they also talk to and confide in each other the relationship deepens and they begin to become more than friends but not an actual couple.

Connell’s academic skills and his relationship with Marianne give him the confidence to imagine escaping his working class roots and he goes off to the same upper class Trinity University that Marianne will attend, instead of going to Galway where his accent would not set him apart, instantly telling his schoolmates his background. He is a sort of fish out of water at Trinity, however.

Marianne is in her element at Trinity and she begins to fit in. The abuse she was subjected to in her family still has her choosing partnerships where she submits to cruel men. In fact as Marianne seeks out men who will treat her badly, she physically becomes thinner and thinner, frailer and frailer. (I did not like the idea that as she became more invisible, almost disappearing, she also, according to the author, became more and more beautiful. This equation which says the thinner you get the more beautiful you become is not necessarily either true or healthy.)

Connell and Marianne come together and part. They try to have relationships with other people but their unfinished business with each other keeps bringing them back into each other’s orbit, while their personality challenges keep driving them apart. It is a dance that is less about love and more about therapy. Can people repair childhood damages in each other? Can they do this without forming a lifelong commitment to each other? Maybe. Is this a bit frustrating to a reader who always wants characters this addicted to each other to find a happy ending? Of course.

Since this is a character-driven novel, do the characters ring true? Almost. They are just a bit too two dimensional for us to really care about them. This is not Anna Karenina. But of course modern Ireland, once quite as tragic as a Russia in transition, now has problems similar to those of any modern nation. These characters could come alive in a movie, but they are not quite that absorbing in Rooney’s book, Normal People. I did enjoy the rare occasions when Connell’s “Sligo” dialect was reflected in the text and I wished that we heard it more often. It is probably impossible to write a perfect book and although some authors come close it is always possible to find flaws, so despite my complaints this was still a novel that I enjoyed reading from cover to cover.

Photo Credit: From a Google Image Search – NPR

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