If an autumn wind were to blow through the streets a few pages of Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, catching them in mid-air, many readers would easily guess the author. They would recognize the sentences constructed with as much precision as long-span bridges, careful to distribute the load. They would find in them emotions of each moment, coldly recorded; monosyllabic dialogues sometimes emerging from the waves while powerful eddies of introspection surge beneath the surface; frolics of a stupefying intensity and sensuality, perceived from within and seen with veneration as a moral force.
From the first pages and throughout the novel, we find here the distinctive style of Conversations between friends, Normal People And Where are you, admirable world? [publiés en 2019, 2020 et 2022 et traduits en français aux éditions de l’Olivier]. Intermezzo is a masterful continuation of the style that made Rooney a global phenomenon. This new opus [paru chez Gallimard] is also more ambitious in its philosophy, more varied in its style, sometimes disturbing and undeniably stranger.
Two brothers in mirror
Two brothers have just lost their father; we discover them in the weeks of confusion that follow the funeral. Ivan Koubek, 22, a shy intellectual, excels in chess tournaments and is cruelly aware of his social maladjustment. According to Peter, he is “totally lit”*but Peter, a lawyer with an easy speech who always wants to be right, is wrong in many ways. Over the course of the chapters alternating between the points of view of the two main characters, who lose and find their bearings, Ivan begins a passionate relationship that surprises everyone who knows him, while Peter, ten years his senior with an overflowing libido, is torn by his desire for two women who are complete opposites.
Ivan’s neurodivergent worldview, slowly and meticulously rendered, nourishes singular forms of eloquence – marked by his hesitant language, contrasting with Peter’s apparent verbal ease, his silences teeming with feeling, his mind and body quivering with doubts and sensations. As repressed emotions are evacuated, Ivan finds himself plunged into astonished rapture, while Peter’s complacency borders on nihilistic despair.
In each of her novels, Sally Rooney places her protagonists in shifting choreographies, where the rhythm of attention pivots on closely related pairs. After the quartet of Conversations between friends and ofWhere are you, admirable world? and the breathtaking duo formed by Marianne and Connell in Normal Peoplewe are here witnessing a play for five characters: two
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