by Sally Rooney
4.4 · 5 reviewsAside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.
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 relationships 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.
5 reviews
The last forty pages, when they finally do, are worth the whole book. Anyone with a sibling they've drifted from will feel this one.
Rooney is a wonderful writer of interiority but I found myself wishing something would happen. Grief is the plot, which is honest but slow.
Peter's sections are fragmentary and staccato in a way that took me fifty pages to adjust to. Once I did, it felt exactly right for a man coming apart. Ivan's chapters are more conventional and easier going.
I expected to be on Peter's side and I wasn't at all. The age gap relationship is written with such tenderness and such awareness of how it looks from outside. Genuinely moved.
Two brothers grieving in completely incompatible ways. Peter medicating himself to sleep, Ivan playing chess and falling for someone fifteen years older — Rooney lets them both be difficult without ever punishing them for it. The Dublin of this book is very real.