Intermezzo - Sally Rooney

RESUME

Ivan et Peter, deux frères que les années ont éloignés, se retrouvent à la mort de leur père. Ivan, vingt-deux ans, est un brillant joueur d'échecs, ultrasensible et solitaire. Peter, juriste renommé de Dublin, est un trentenaire aux multiples conquêtes. Tous deux vivent des amours périlleuses pendant ce moment délicat du deuil, intermède de vie où la fragilité n'exclut pas l'aventure. 

CE QUE J'EN AI PENSE

Sally Rooney a encore frappé. Avec Intermezzo, elle nous offre un livre d'une justesse redoutable. Comme toujours, l'écrivaine nous parle de relations. Relations amoureuses, relations fraternelles, relations conflictuelles. L'autrice nous plonge dans la psyché de Peter et d'Ivan, deux frères que tout semble opposer. Peter, la trentaine, riche avocat, au large cercle social. Ivan, vingt-deux ans, joueur d'échecs, maladroit dans ses rapports avec les autres. Et pourtant, alors qu'ils affrontent tous les deux le deuil de leur père, nous découvrons ce qui les rapproche : le besoin d'être aimé. Un besoin humain primordial. Les relations amoureuses des deux frères sont complexes, tumultueuses et révèlent chez eux leurs failles, leur vulnérabilité, leur sensibilité. Intermezzo est un roman d'une finesse psychologique rare, dans la continuité des autres œuvres de Sally Rooney. Il m'a semblé que l'écriture ici était encore plus aboutie. Il y a ce rythme lent, cette façon de raconter comme si l'on vivait les événements avec cette tendance qu'à notre œil à relever des détails insignifiants mais aussi à s'attarder sur la beauté et la poésie du monde qui nous entoure. Cette façon de raconter la pensée aussi, à la fois fluide et fragmentée. C'est ainsi que les mots de Sally Rooney trouvent un écho en nous et résonnent au plus profond de notre être. C'est à la fois doux et puissant. Comme une vague qui nous berce et nous emporte.

 

SUMMARY

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.

MY THOUGHTS

Sally Rooney has done it again. With Intermezzo, she has given us a book that feels formidably true. As always, the author talks about relationships. Love relationships, sibling relationships, conflictual relationships. The author plunges us into the psyche of Peter and Ivan, two brothers whom everything seems to oppose. Peter, in his thirties, is a wealthy lawyer with a wide social circle. Ivan, twenty-two, a chess player, awkward in his relationships with others. And yet, as they both deal with the loss of their father, we discover what brings them together: the need to be loved. A primordial human need. The brothers' romantic relationships are complex and tumultuous, revealing their flaws, their vulnerability and their sensitivity. Intermezzo is a novel of rare psychological finesse, in keeping with Sally Rooney's other works. I felt that the writing here was even more accomplished. There's this slow rhythm, this way of recounting events as if we were living them, with our eye's tendency to pick out insignificant details but also to linger on the beauty and poetry of the world around us. It's also a way of recounting thought that's both fluid and fragmented. It's in this way that Sally Rooney's words resonate with us to the very depths of our being. It's both gentle and powerful. Like a wave that rocks us and carries us away.