The millennial generation has aged. The university is now the workplace, there are more family obligations, the deaths of loved ones are no longer unusual, friendship is no longer the main emotional relationship. These changes do not mean that conflicts among young people have disappeared or, at least, not completely. Emotional issues are just as complicated, if not more so, although perhaps for different reasons than before. Or for the same reasons, but from a different angle. This is how Sally Rooney (Castlebar, Ireland, 1991) tells it in Intermezzohis highly anticipated latest novel which will be released on September 26 worldwide. Random House is publishing it in Spanish with a translation by Inga Pellisa and Periscopi in Catalan translated by Ferran Ràfols Gesa.
This is the author’s fourth book to earn the title of “voice of her generation” since the publication of her first novel. Conversations between friends (Random House) in 2017 at age 26. A degree she hadn’t worked hard for – if she aspired to be one A voice of this generation, as Lena Dunham’s character said in Girls– but it helps critics and their editorials present it without having to give too much explanation.
Intermezzo It’s the story of two brothers who are grieving the death of their father. They live in Dublin and Peter, the eldest, is a renowned lawyer with very clear moral principles in his speech that sometimes conflict with his behavior. He is 10 years older than his brother Ivan, a chess player who was a prodigy in his childhood but who, at 22, is more of an expert in off-peak hours. The relationship between the two has long since ceased to be good, even if that was in the past. Now they despise each other, each for their own reasons.
The emphasis on the male relationship
In his world is Sylvia, a former girlfriend of Peter, who is almost part of the family and maintains contact with Ivan even though she is no longer his brother’s partner. They broke up after she suffered a serious accident that left her with chronic pain and now maintain a close platonic relationship despite the fact that the old feelings remain. In addition, he has an affair with a student named Naomi, to whom he also leaves money when she needs it, a detail that bothers him even if he does not want to give it too much importance. Ivan has at his side Margaret, a thirty-year-old woman almost divorced from an alcoholic, whom he meets at a chess exhibition in a neighboring town, and his dog Alexei, whom he must take care of without knowing how.
Even though some of her characters have aged, like her, the recurring themes of her novels remain: class difference, the elasticity of the boundaries of what is permissible in romantic relationships, sexual attraction that cannot be contained, religious beliefs (a little embarrassed), absent parental figures, feminism. It has retained some of its familiar settings, such as the university – where Peter and Sylvia met and where they now work – and self-referential details, such as the debating championships they competed in as youths. She was a champion debating champion herself, and the essay she published in The Dublin Review in 2015, Even if you beat me, – with which he caught the attention of his agent – deals with the subject.
The most notable change introduced in Intermezzo (a term used to define an unexpected move in chess) is that the protagonists are no longer two friends, but two male brothers. They are the ones who decide, even if the writer also lets Sylvia and Margaret speak. Only Naomi’s thoughts are intuitive because she barely shows what she thinks, even if it helps her to trace the love triangle and, incidentally, to criticize the housing problem in Dublin (extendable to the rest of Europe).
400 pages of precise sentences and dialogues without hyphens or quotes to which he added a few others to refer to quotes from other texts by authors such as Shakespeare, Russell, Keats, Henry James, TS Elliot, Bobby Fischer or Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others. . 400 pages of a story that ends a little abruptly, like his penultimate book. Where are you, beautiful world? (Random House, 2021).
All machines
If the marketing campaign that his Anglo-Saxon publishers carried out with his previous novel was overwhelming – pop-up stores, writing and candle-making workshops, promotional kits including a yellow hat, a fabric bag, pencils and a pencil sharpener, among other actions –, that of Intermezzo has gone up a level. The mass mailing of proofs to booksellers, journalists and influencers (booktokers, booktubers and even celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker) managed to get the novel to already have over 500 reviews, almost all positive, on Goodreads before it was published.
And, what’s more, they’ve also managed to make these advance copies a very greedy status symbol, as Madeline Diamond analyzed in detail in The Esquire (curiously, she clarified that she didn’t have them because she hadn’t asked for them, a note that seems more like a justification). A move that had already been made with the previous version – some copies sold online for hundreds of dollars – but on a smaller scale.
Additionally, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, its North American publisher, hosted an event four days ago with Belletrist, Karah Preiss’s book club and actress Emma Roberts (both in attendance) at the Irish Arts Center in New York to celebrate the publication. The party, more typical of the fashion industry than the publishing industry, featured a bead booth for making “friendship bracelets” and chess-themed cookies, a photo booth, yellow-and-white merch like the book’s English-language cover and featured a performance by DJ Books, a well-known booktuber named Adam Beaser. And of course, attendees also took home a copy of the book.
The fact that the writer does not participate in any of these events – she would surely prefer to lock herself in a castle and throw away the key rather than do it – does not prevent her from being classified as the “Taylor Swift of literature” (publishers know very clearly who to address) and debates are generated for or against her person rather than her writings. But, as the journalist Begoña Gómez said in an article on the “for or against” raised by Rooney: “She is not responsible for the expectations generated by everything she does, she is not guilty of her fandom, some factions of which can make you feel a little sick to your stomach and she is only partially responsible for the campaigns around their launches.
Rooney’s Super Power
In Spanish-speaking markets, the marketing campaign has not been or will not be as massive as the Anglo-Saxon one. Random House editor-in-chief Roberta Gerhard explained to elDiario.es that “Sally Rooney is a global phenomenon. Her books have been translated into 40 languages, even though she is an author who is mainly read in English. This explains why the scale of the launch in Ireland, the United Kingdom or the United States “can hardly be reproduced in other countries,” she maintains. Despite everything, Gerhard affirms that the plan for Latin America is also very ambitious.
Are these publishers’ efforts translating into sales? The publisher is diplomatic, but not overly concrete. He calls sales projections “very good,” with an estimated readership of 150,000, and the book “an exquisite advance in her writing.” “Sally Rooney reads our lives like no one else, and words are her superpower,” he says.
The book doesn’t go on sale for another two days, but today the press embargo and influencers of the sector, who were not allowed to talk about it. Some photos of the kitchen cover had been seen on social networks (this status), but no opinions or reviews like this one. In Anglo-Saxon countries it was possible and on TikTok and Instagram it is easy to find users talking about the book or showing a promotional product like the cloth bag. Interviews with the author have also been published in newspapers (it is assumed that she will not grant them to the Spanish media) and reviews like the very enthusiastic one from the Guardian, in which the signatory wonders if there is a better novelist than Rooney now. There will surely be many opinions on this.
