Reviews tagging 'Drug use'

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

176 reviews

sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: No
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Impressively skillful writing style, deeply depressing content. 

Expand filter menu Content Warnings
emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: No
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

This was my first Sally Rooney book and I figured it would be helpful to use this book to see what the Sally Rooney hype is all about. From the outset, I knew she was a contemporary fiction author who writes mainly about people’s relationships. The relationships are toxic, and her writing style is dense, a la James Joyce, and (perhaps my biggest writing pet peeve) no quotation marks on the dialogue. This type of writing style is esoteric, high brow, and pretentious, and tends to hit its sweet spot among college age and girls in their twenties - the right spot of youthful foolishness and a transient belief that your second decade of living is the wisest you’ll ever be. 

I will give Rooney her laurels for two things. The first being that I can understand why people are drawn to her books. She does a good job of fleshing out her character’s thoughts and really showing you their perfections of reality - especially the parts that make them aggravating. I can tell that she understands to some degree the capacity for human psychology, multiplicity of thought, and the miscommunication that happens in all human connections. The second thing is that Rooney does a good job of demonstrating how pervasive patriarchal stereotypes and commodification of women occur, in an overt, brash, incel-labeled manner, and the insidious, internalized, gaslit, and pervasive manners. 

I don’t find these writing chops enough to overcome the multitude of sins Rooney commits in her writing. If this novel is anything to go by, they are so painfully male centric. While the two brothers are foils to each other in how they process grief (which is the red herring of this book by the way), they are foils to demonstrate how men poorly treat women. One brother, Ivan, self labels as an incel, but it’s because he didn’t know any better and was simply testing out world philosophies until he got older. One brother, Peter, is a self labeled human rights activists who champions women’s rights and yet puts himself in a deceitful love triangle that nearly ruins the lives of two good women as collateral. 

The novel continually portrays women as the rehabilitation homes for these men and their dysfunctional lives and dysfunctional processing skills. These women are physically and emotionally battered from their own complex lives and yet they are the ones providing therapy, emotional processing, love, sex, and other needs meeting for these two pathetic men. These women could each have such rich lives but instead are reduced to flat, inanimate objects, used only to gratify each brother’s lust or need for emotional soothing. I nearly quit reading this book so many times after reading another onslaught of one of these women being vulnerable and these men preying on their emotional abilities to unwind their traumas. 

Another element I absolutely detested was the implicit nodding Rooney was doing in making Ivan a neurodivergent character. First off, I think it quite frankly does nothing for the disability community to see a white, privileged, middle class , heterosexual man, who is a chess savant, be the representation of neurodivergence. Not only does it fall into so many unhelpful stereotypes, but Ivan’s atrocious behavior is often implicitly related to being a by product of his neurodivergence. I don’t think Rooney has the faintest clue of what she was trying to do with this character. I for one saw Ivan representing something else, not neurodivergence. He seems to me to be an example of a person with Borderline Personality Disorder. His character is someone who thinks purely in black and white, who does a lot of splitting (a rationalization in which things or a person are completely good or completely evil), and latches onto a romantic partner immediately and shows a disproportionate emotional attachment to them (sometimes called a “favorite person”). This is not all the issues that people with BPD face and it’s possible that Rooney wasn’t even trying to bring about this correlation. But to me, I see more character traits and thought patterns reminiscent of a personality disorder than neurodivergence in Ivan. And I could do the same analysis for Peter as well (especially with his penchant for violence, emotional gaslighting, and quick devolution into self harm). 

In all, while this book has some interesting passages, there are some glaring issues, namely the way in which Rooney writes her women characters. Which is quite alarming to me considering the fact that her readership base is female. She’s basically glorifying a woman’s suffering and emotional abuse in a relationship all for the point of rehabilitating men who are too weak, too shallow, too selfish, and too self possessed? It’s as if you’re stargazing into a puddle. That’s all I could see in this book. And after reading it, I think I’ve seen all that I want to see about Rooney’s works. I prefer my authors and their works to decenter men fully. 

Expand filter menu Content Warnings
dark emotional reflective sad medium-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

An interesting reflection of how grief and love affect our relationships, but I’m glad my relationships are not as messy and toxic as the ones in this story are. 

Expand filter menu Content Warnings
challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Expand filter menu Content Warnings
emotional sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

This book scratched the right itch for a story that expounds on human condition with messiness and the shittiness that comes from living it. Idk it wasn’t perfect and Sylvia did deserve more fleshed out characterization as Margaret may have. But I kind of understand as we are in Peter’s pov in someways, so he was just as confused as we are as readers.
Overall, this book helped me get out of my reading funk and Rooney’s writing style clicked with how my brain works just really well. Connected with Ivan and his realizations as well as Peter’s characters that couldn’t be more different but reconciling nonetheless. I loved it.

Expand filter menu Content Warnings
emotional reflective sad tense slow-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

Expand filter menu Content Warnings
emotional reflective medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Complicated relations written with a realistic tone. The writing makes you pause and think as the characters do, and in the process develop an empathetic view. It contemplates often about your presumptions, world views and of society in a way that builds acceptance. The relationships between the characters are fairly complex and the situations they are in calls for thoughtful understanding. However I sometimes felt disconnected from the characters due to the writing style, which brought my focus away from the explored concepts and instead on deciphering what the character is thinking. Overall a lovely book to start the year with.

Expand filter menu Content Warnings
challenging emotional reflective tense 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

Expand filter menu Content Warnings
emotional reflective sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Expand filter menu Content Warnings
dark emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-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

Expand filter menu Content Warnings