Intermezzo

Honestly, it’s hard to know what this book is about. At least at first glance. Unlike The Queen’s Gambit and The Last Checkmate, chess isn’t the main focus of the book, but one of the main characters, Ivan Koubek, is a competitive chess player. The book is really about Ivan and his older brother, Peter, dealing with the loss of their father. And how everyone copes, grieves, differently.

The format of this book is different too. It’s like one of those Reddit posts that’s just a wall of text. No quotations for dialogue, even. But that doesn’t make it bad. If anything, it makes it more interesting.

The story’s narrator is third-person omniscient, and it’s almost like a deep dive into each character’s consciousness — a stream of consciousness, to be literary about it.

Which at times can make it hard to follow. Although it does have paragraph breaks, if the reader isn’t focused on it, it can be confusing as to who is talking or what’s going on in the scene.

That said, it’s nice to read a book about the human experience. The characters are just normal people, with normal emotions. It’s relatable, and that’s only part of what makes Intermezzo an excellent novel.