Sally Rooney

An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family, from the global phenomenon 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

Helen 

And why not after all. Why not accept wholeheartedly life's offerings. 

smile??

Macy HB

Lightly she has to hold the world, lovingly but lightly.

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

Life itself, he thinks, every moment of life, is as precious and beautiful as any game of chess ever played, if only you know how to live.

Life, after all, has not slipped hree of its netting. There is no such life, slipping free: life is itself the netting, holding people in place, making sense of things. It is not possible to tear away the constraints and simply carry on a senseless exist- ence. People, other people, make it impossible. But without other people, there would be no life at all. 

The demands of other people do not dissolve; they only multiply. More and more complex, more difficult. Which is another way. she thinks, of saying: more life, more and more of life.

But then they say one adjusts. The old life of pleasure gone and never returning: accept, or else delude yourself, all the same in the end. The will to live so much stronger than anyone imagines. Like a kind of death, what happened. A kind of death you survive out of politeness, respect for others, out of selfless love. Christ also survived his own death. And was dignified and exalted. 

Had believed once that life must lead to something, all the unresolved conflicts and questions leading on towards some great culmination. Curịously underexamined beliefs like that, underpinning his life, his personality. Irrational attachment to meaning. All very well as far as it goes, the question of constitutionality arises, and so on. Couldn't go to work in the morning if he didn't think something meant something meant something else. But what is it all leading up to. An end without an ending.

Life isn't just talking, you know. […] But what does she mean: life isn't just talking? Love's austere and lonely offices perhaps.

But a person's outward appearance does not defne the boundaries of their internal feelings, Ivan knows. Plain, unappealing people are by no means exempt from the experience of strong passions. 

Intermezzo quotes

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