Reviews with content warning for Drug use - Intermezzo

Reviews tagging 'Drug use'

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

177 reviews

aliciae08's review against another edition

1.75

sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Y’all, I’ve had enough.

This is my fourth Sally Rooney novel. And each one is more and more disappointing to me. Even though I have not had an enjoyable experience with any of the previous three, I could always see merit in Rooney’s writing style. So imagine my surprise when I found myself wanting to DNF Intermezzo multiple times.

With the exception of the last 3 chapters, this book was a mess. One review said “I can’t believe we’re still allowed to write autistic people like this” and I have to agree. Whilst both main characters are written horribly (pretentious, unlikable and lacking accountability) the character of Ivan is just egregious in that it seems to paint people with an autism diagnosis in this very specific way—with rage. It detracts from the grief.

Whilst Rooney is notable for writing the blandest of the bland, the female characters (Sylvia, Naomi and Christine) are written so flat. They’re just objects to move Peter along. We do get more of an insight into Margaret, but all of the female characters serve to bolster the ego of the men they supposedly love.

The last three chapters are the only ones I felt there was real feeling. What happens when grief causes us to explode at the people we ultimately blame? What happens when we can’t accept our own faults in the wake of loss? But I’m sure this could’ve been achieved in less than 400 pages.

Content Warnings

uwishuwouldknowthat's review against another edition

5.0

dark emotional relaxing medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

emilyseebold's review against another edition

5.0

emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

keegan_leech's review against another edition

5.0

challenging emotional reflective fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Sally Rooney seems to have this ability to entangle and blend together emotions like no one else. It's as though she writes "run-on feelings" which flow into one another and can't be picked apart afterwards. Individual emotional phrases might be simple, in some cases almost cliché, but in a torrent of other emotions, the overall sense is of something more complex and true-to-life.

Haven't we all at some point felt that our emotional turmoil is entirely unique to ourselves, and also that Joni Mitchell has conveniently written it down in words and turned it into a massive international hit? Rooney's writing, in my experience, evokes that same sense of experiencing something simultaneously deeply personal and infinitely relatable. I constantly vacillate when reading her work between "These feelings must be universal, surely everyone has felt this way," and "I never knew this feeling could be described, I never thought anyone else felt like this". Really, it isn't even what her characters feel that makes Rooney's writing so familiar, but the way they feel. They're bundles of a million incompatible impulses and desires, mundane and pretentious and self-destructive and transcendent all at once. (Just like me and you!)

This kind of emotional emulsification of confusing and contradictory feelings is in a broader sense how Rooney treats all human relationships. Intermezzo captures this particularly well; one passage, which might as well be the novel's thesis statement, reads:

Life, after all, has not slipped free 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 existence. People, other people, make it impossible. But without other people, there would be no life at all. Judgement, reproval, disappointment, conflict: these are the means by which people remain connected to one another.

I find that a moving sentiment, and Intermezzo expresses it far better than I ever could. So go read the book! Entangle yourself in the emotions of others, in life itself.

All the usual impact of Rooney's writing aside, this novel affected me very deeply. I don't know if it was something about myself or my life, if I was just especially receptive to it at the time I picked it up, or if this is just Rooney's best work yet and this is what everyone else must feel too. Whatever the case, it did something to me and I find it impossible to say exactly what. It seems as though the novel has burrowed into me and is rearranging some part of myself that I can't reach. It's going to stay with me a long time, I can tell.

After all my effusive praise for the novel and my own attempts to pick it apart in my head, I find it hard to say why it's felt so personally impactful. Which is not a bad experience, I think.

Content Warnings

dearbhlanoonan's review against another edition

emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

tiedtopages's review against another edition

4.5

challenging emotional hopeful inspiring reflective

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

gemblacol's review against another edition

4.0

emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

nathiddles_106's review against another edition

3.75

emotional sad medium-paced

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

sksrenninger's review against another edition

4.0

challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I love me some Roons, but I would love to read something by her that doesn’t lean so heavily on what it’s like to be unfathomably brilliant at university in Ireland. Can she do it? Do I really care? Will I read it all and love it all anyway? Of course.
She has a section at the end with notes about quotes and references that she’s used across the book, particularly in Peter’s mind. I really loved the way she wove all of these in. Peter’s stream of conscious read intuitively to me, and I appreciated that I got some references and didn’t get others—which is how conversations with friends (indulge me) usually work—but that she left me a trail of breadcrumbs at the end. I suppose that what I like most about Sally Rooney is that her style reads intuitively to me—her characters think like I do.
She is weirdly good at sex scenes. I couldn’t help but wonder (now we’e really indulging me) if the sex scenes read equally well across genders, or if there’s something specifically for the female experience here. They’re really not that explicit but they are still somehow steamy and moving across a variety of pairings.
God, do we all say actually and literally that much?

Content Warnings

verdescheele's review against another edition

4.5

emotional hopeful reflective sad

Content Warnings

More...