8 Books Sally Rooney Read While Writing Intermezzo

For me, this book ranks among the greatest triumphs of the novel as a form. Its plot deals with the death of a family patriarch, the turmoil of an eldest son torn between his love for two different women, and the tribulations of an intellectually gifted younger brother named Ivan. But I thought enough time had passed for these themes to warrant further consideration.

In my experience, many books of philosophy are difficult to read. Philosophical Investigations, on the other hand, is easy to read, but difficult to understand. In fact, it has all the qualities of a great novel: charismatic prose style, dazzling psychological insight, and ingenious fictional dialogue. Inexplicably, the English text seems to be out of print—but I’m hoping that if I talk about it enough, someone might decide to publish a new edition.

Another famous story about a son grappling with the loss of a father. About halfway through writing Intermezzo, I re-read Hamlet, and found it completely absorbing and unexpectedly strange—full of odd offhanded things that didn’t seem to make any sense. T.S. Eliot described Hamlet as “puzzling,” “disquieting,” and “most certainly an artistic failure.” I agree with him on the first two counts, but not on the third.

My path back to Hamlet came through James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which the work of Shakespeare looms large. I’ve written elsewhere about my love of Ulysses, which I think is one of the finest novels in the English language and largely (honestly!) a pure pleasure to read. I’m indebted to it in more ways than I can list here. I’ll just say that—like all my favorite books, and I think more than any of Joyce’s others—Ulysses is really very funny.

Another novel haunted by Hamlet is Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, which concerns a theatre troupe rehearsing for an Arabic-language production of the play in the occupied West Bank. In her non-fiction, Hammad writes beautifully and with great moral clarity about Palestine; she is also a gifted novelist, and Enter Ghost is a moving and unforgettable book.

One of the protagonists of Intermezzo is a competitive chess player, whose obsession with the game has dominated much of his life. Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane offers another portrait of a young person passionately fixated on a competitive hobby: an adolescent girl who becomes obsessed with squash in the wake of her mother’s death. I really loved this book and felt I learned a lot from it.

While writing Intermezzo, I often found myself thinking about our growth-dependent economic system and the resource-intensive lifestyles it requires us to lead. As the climate crisis escalates, why are we so committed to producing more and more of what we don’t need? What other ways of organizing our societies are possible? Kõhei Saitō offers an accessible and convincing treatment of these questions in Slow Down, which was a bestseller in Japan in 2020 under its original title Capital in the Anthropocene.

I first read Chéri ten or fifteen years ago and was swept away by the novel’s sheer sensuous beauty. Its story of a love affair between an older woman and a younger man is grounded in a luxurious physicality, replete with rich descriptions of clothing and furniture and meals. Reading it again this year, I found it as ravishing as ever—but also much darker and more melancholy than I remembered.