First Impression Friday will be a meme where you talk about a book that you JUST STARTED! Maybe you’re only a chapter or two in, maybe a little farther. Based on this sampling of your current read, give a few impressions and predict what you’ll think by the end.

Synopsis:

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationship with two very different women – his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude – a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

Happy Friday everyone! Technically it is already Saturday so, happy weekends everyone! We were able to make it through another workweek! Thankfully, All Saints’ Day is a holiday here in the Philippines so we had one extra day of reprieve. I hope everyone ended the work week on a high note. I hope you were able to accomplish all your tasks for the week. Props to everyone for making it through the workweek. It is time to unwind and dive into the weekend! Yesterday was the first day of the eleventh month of the year. We are inching ever closer to the conclusion of 2024 and the commencement of a new year. How time flies! Before the year ends, I hope your hard work gets recognized and repaid. I hope the remainder of the year will be brimming with good news, blessings, and pleasant surprises. More importantly, I hope everyone will be healthy in body, mind, and spirit.

I am sharing a fresh First Impression Friday update to cap the blogging week. This weekly meme has become an integral part of my weekly blogging ritual. It used to be an update blog that allowed me to figure out my initial feelings about the book I was reading. Over time, my First Impression Friday updates have turned into springboards for my book reviews. Reading-wise, October was a mixed bag. It started as a foray into the works of Nobel Laureates in Literature set into motion by Olga Tokarczuk’s latest novel and South Korean writer Han Kang’s well-deserved recognition this year. This was followed by my immersion into the works shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. At the start of the month, I received copies of the other five books from the shortlist I have yet to read. Thankfully, I was able to complete reading them during the month.

After completing all Booker Prize-shortlisted books before October ended, my reading journey has become very open again. For now, I am focusing on newly released books and books that are part of my ongoing reading challenges. My current read, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, belongs to the former. It was in 2019 when I first heard of the Irish writer. Her sophomore novel, Normal People (2018), was part of my 2019 Top 10 Books I Look Forward To List. While I liked the writing – I find Irish writers very much competent in this department – I was not a fan of the rest of it. This, however, did not stop me from reading her succeeding works. However, I had the same experience with Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021). To be fair, I liked the story better and the quality of the writing did not diminish. When I learned about her latest release, I was still looking forward to it, if only for the quality of writing.

At over 400 pages, Intermezzo is palpably the longest of the three Rooney novels I have read; I have yet to read her debut novel, Conversation with Friends (2017). Rooney’s fourth novel charts the story of brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek following the death of their father after years of battling against cancer. When their mother left then when Ivan was still young, Peter and Ivan were raised primarily by their father, a Slovakian engineer who immigrated to Ireland in the 1980s. Peter, the older brother, is a lawyer in Dublin in his thirties. He is competent and built a successful practice. He used to be in a relationship with Sylvia Larkin. Years before, Sylvia ended their relationship after a car accident led to her experiencing chronic pain. Fast forward to the present, Peter was trying to win her back.

To win his former lover back, Peter was trying to build a bond with his younger brother. You see, Peter and Ivan have always had a distant relationship. Ivan was twenty-two years old and was a chess prodigy. His older brother, however, thought that his prodigious talent was born out of him being a special child. Despite the stark dichotomies between their dispositions, they were both palpably struggling with grief. Apart from trying to win back Sylvia, Peter is romantically involved with Naomi, a college student who sells explicit pictures of her online and relies on Peter financially. Ivan, on the other hand, participated in chess competitions and exhibitions. It was through one such exhibition that he met Margaret Kearns, a thirty-six-year-old woman. Ivan was immediately attracted to the elderly woman who had no qualms indulging Ivan’s advances because it was a deviation from small-town life.

I just started reading the book but I managed to lay out the pieces. Again, the book lacks quotation marks; it has been Rooney’s hallmark. I can’t wait to see how the two brothers would reconcile, or if their story will even lead to one. It seems that both are bound for timely character development. This is one of the things I am looking forward to. So far, the story is going great. I am getting to know the brothers individually. I do expect that Rooney will delve into the concerns of millennials, as she has done in her earlier works. Intermezzo would be more interesting because it seems that it will probe into the intersection between millennials and Gen Z, or at least that is how I perceive it. I can’t wait to see how the story pans out. How about you fellow reader? What book or books have you read over the weekend? I hope you get to enjoy whatever you are reading right now. Happy weekend!