Being Taylor Swift – Entertainment News

If there’s one thing about Irish author and screenwriter Sally Rooney’s latest work, it’s this: Intermezzo (2024), their characters will not pass the Bechdel test, which evaluates how women are featured in a work of fiction as a measure of gender representation, with a gun.

Does this bother me? I am sure. Is this something that bothered me about your previous work? 100%. Will I continue reading his books anyway? Certainly. I believe this is based on something my colleague said in passing recently. Rooney looks like Taylor Fast You may hate him, but you can’t ignore him or the loyal readership he’s amassed.

IntermezzoRoon-ey’s latest book is about the lives of two brothers: Peter Kou-bek, a 32-year-old ‘successful’ lawyer living in Dublin, and Ivan Koubek, a 22-year-old competitive chess player whom we also know. He said he was a socially awkward loner. The book begins a few weeks after the duo lost their father to a long-term illness; They’re both grieving, they’re both trying to navigate their lives, and they’re both wondering how it happened. life This continues even though you have just lost your father.

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Grief continues throughout the book, but as they both try to get back on a regular schedule, Ivan meets an older woman at a chess match: 36-year-old Margaret, still in a complicated relationship with her ex-husband. . The two, who are at first hesitant about their age difference, soon fall in love with each other and realize that they both belong to the “same camp”.

Peter is also trying to make sense of his relationships with his ex-partner Sylvia, with whom he broke up years ago but is still in love with, and with Naomi, a 23-year-old university student whom we constantly remind him of. she was engaging in a form of online sex work.

Although Rooney takes turns telling the story from the perspectives of Peter, Ivan, and sometimes Margaret, women are not the strongest side in the book. It’s understandable that when Peter and Ivan take control of the narrative, we learn more about their lives, emotions, and struggles. But it feels like women are reduced to mere elements, existing only to validate what the Koubek sisters feel, obey them in bed, and advance the plot. Even more so in the case of Naomi, who is often talked about in seemingly ephemeral ways.

What is interesting is that Rooney, a Marxist, infiltrates some of the political issues of today’s Ireland through different characters in the book. However, these are so subtly woven into the verse that people who do not know the context will probably not pay attention to them. For example, near the end of the book, Peter’s substance abuse problem finds him trying to pour vodka into a lemonade bottle in a public restroom. Or the fact that there’s a housing crisis in Dublin, or Ivan’s internal conflicts about getting paid to crunch data for a company and not doing anything that will have a real-world impact while people sleep hungry because of food shortages.

While the stigma surrounding the age gap aspect of relationships is never truly explored, the social implications for women are left to the reader’s imagination.

But there is one thing Intermezzo reaches the point. The purpose of the book is to paint a picture of a sibling relationship that has been torn apart and held together only by the presence of one parent, now completely falling apart during the grieving process. And it achieves this beautifully.

Rooney’s true talent is exploring complex relationships in ways that feel deeply real and tangible. There were moments in the book where Ivan said I wasn’t there for his brother, and it made me wonder how many times I was blind to my family’s problems because, like the chess prodigy, I couldn’t think of anyone else but my own. self. The resentment each of them creates towards each other and themselves makes it interesting to read.

The final chapter of the book feels like a redemption then. The long monologues in which Ivan and Peter try to reflect on their own lives make up for any other perceived flaws, such as the slow pace and strategic games in Naomi and Peter’s story. For a novel that manages to grab the reader’s attention in all the right ways, the only glaring thorn in its side is the lack of well-fleshed out female characters, which is something Rooney seems to have completely abandoned in the novel. Intermezzo.