Sally Rooney

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

Intermezzo

Manaswini

And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another? 

Lindy

andrea valentina 

The human mind, for all the credit he was just giving it a minute ago, is often repetitive, often trapped in a familiar cycle of unproductive thoughts, which in Ivan's case are usually regretful in nature.

And for this he feels tender wounding gratitude, a sense of blessing, that he exists simply in this body, in this mind, that he is himself, this one person, rich in priceless resources which to his conscious mind remain almost infinitely unknown.

Liam Collins

He smiles back at her. It's weird, he says. I feel like if I created a new human being out of nothing, I would be very happy with them. Just that they were alive, even. You know, that's my dad's attitude. Or it was. He was always happy with us.

But I’m very happy that I met you. And even knowing that you're alive, I feel like my life will be a lot better. 

Last weekend, with the light coming through the curtains, she and Ivan lay half-awake in each other’s arms: and when he looked at her, she seemed to feel herself understood completely, as if everything that had ever happened to her, everything that she had ever done, was accepted quietly into his understanding. 

Without speaking they made love, and the intimacy between them felt total and perfect, their ways of knowing one another passing out beyond language.

Laura Dobie

Easier to perceive the way the years accumulate in others. For Anna there must be such a Margaret, who has been one thing and is now another, while Margaret looking at her own life sees only the onwardly flowing blur of all experience.

That night, Ivan is in the kitchen of his flat, eating a bowl of instant noodles and scrolling through a page of search results matching the query: need a temporary home for my dog ireland. Once again, however, after five or six attempts using different keywords, the results consist of links like 'How to Foster a Dog' and 'Dogs Available for Fostering Now'. To take a dog out of the fostering system, into one's home, appears to be very simple, and yet Ivan cannot find a single website explaining how to put a dog into that same system. No process, obviously, can consist exclusively of output, without any corresponding input. The dogs are coming from somewhere.

It's easy to do things you're already good at, that's not courageous. Trying to do something you might not be capable of doing- He breaks off here, apparently thinking again, chewing a crust of bread. We're being hard on ourselves in a way, he remarks, because both our lives involve some voluntary exposure to what other people might call defeat. Which I think requires a certain degree of courage. Even if just psychologically.

Intermezzo quotes

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