I devoured Sally Rooney’s latest, Intermezzo.

It’s the story of two very different brothers – Peter is a lawyer in his thirties, successful and seemingly self-assured. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player, and a loner. He has always seen himself as socially awkward – the antithesis of Peter.

How often in life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand. So often that it’s practically baseline, just normal existence for him. And this is not only due to the irrational nature of other people, and the consequent irrationality of the rules and processes they devise; it’s due to Ivan himself, his fundamental unsuitedness to life. He knows this. He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind. Continue reading →