Intermezzo - Daniëlle van den Brink

A (lecture hall) recording of the lecture will be made. This will be posted on the Spraakmakende Boeken website after the lecture.

Sally Rooney’s fourth novel Intermezzo (2024) follows two brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek, in the aftermath of their father’s passing. Peter, the older brother, is an outwardly-successful and competent lawyer who collapses under the weight of this loss and is caught between two complicated romantic entanglements. The younger brother, Ivan, is a socially-awkward former chess prodigy whose success has stagnated and is beginning to explore a romantic relationship with a woman who is much older than he is. Disoriented by their grief, the brothers become increasingly more estranged from each other, each embroiled in their own emotional impasses.

Intermezzo is considered to be Rooney’s most stylistically ambitious work, adopting different narrative styles for each of the characters. The novel is about loss, intimacy, and the complexity of relationships, familial as well as romantic. In my lecture, I will focus on Rooney’s exploration of modern masculinity, specifically how this comes through in Peter and Ivan’s struggle with emotional expression and vulnerability. I will also talk about the form of the novel, with a focus on chess as a stylistic device for the dynamic between characters who make strategic moves, but are emotionally checkmated.