laconic inertia 2/58
Jan. 14th, 2026 02:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jiazhouif you have my book instagram skip this lol
This novel overflows with ennui. I still don’t know what to say about this novel that has probably not already been said. It’s definitely a novel. It’s certainly a book.
Although inhabiting the usual haunts of a novel, it feels formless and detached from that; umbilical cord sundered, a distant relative evolved along similar paths to present traits close enough to trick the lay person into an evidence deficient conclusion that it is one. It is and isn’t in the ordinary sense of the word.
It took a third of the book to acclimatise to Rooney’s style. It requires little emotional effort to read, and sometimes I had to double back because reading it felt like dipping your hand into water, the quality of the water itself more interesting than the path it was taking.
It’s somewhat difficult to say what this book elicits because it doesn’t feel like it does much of that. The ruminations on difficult familial relationships are well trod, spool of grief playing second fiddle to their relationships with the women in their life. I understand what compels people about Rooney but the focus on distinctly male misery to the supplantation of all else doesn’t enamour me.
Ivan, as a character, was fine. I liked Margaret more than him but that’s not especially difficult of a feat. His chapters had fewer lines that I bookmarked. His interiority was a lot of circling around in a fruitless manner for meaning and an answer that would fit his understanding of the world. His development over the course of the book was neither compelling nor unexpected. His internal justifications were rooted in a distinct lack of empathy and an unwillingness to observe the reality for what it was, instead retreating to frittering about vacuous truths and the elisions between truth and its absence.
His development maps closer to common criticisms of the book: Women are meant to fix men, The Bechdel test is failed and we’re locked in 2016. Sure, if you count emotional stuntedness as healing despite an immature wallowing to a fight that looms over the novel, not for its importance but because Ivan is categorically unable to move past it so the novel has to belabour it. Tedium grows fallow.
Peter, however, is a much funnier character to read. The number of lines highlighted from his chapters is a testament to his ability to mine his misery for mighty little lines that trace the contours of the internal workings of his mind. His preoccupation, seemingly, is that he’s torn between two beautiful women, oh no! but what he really wrangles with is his self-hatred. It annihilates him.
His unconscious desire for meaning leads Peter to assume the role preordained for him, provider and consummate defender of the weak and ailing and defenceless, but alienates him entirely from others. His strand of misogyny is far more interesting in that it almost seems unintentional, that it is patriarchy calcified. He never asks either Naomi or Sylvia how they should proceed, seeks Sylvia for intellectual affirmation and out of a need to pick at a wound unhealed, assumes flippant financial responsibility for Naomi and is tortured by his failure to meaningfully connect with Ivan until the end of the novel.
Margaret and Ivan’s relationship is of no concern. It exists and is perfectly fine. That she exists and mends Ivan’s misogynistic rhetoric by the simple miracle of her existence is, like, okay we’re really leading people into easy castigations of the novel. I like Margaret enough, and she seems decently humanised by both male narrators. I’d say she seems more human than Sylvia who is mythologised and imbued with an almost holy reverence throughout the text. Peter fails to see Sylvia and Sylvia is withdrawn, their relationship cold and distant. It is not distant in the conventional sense but the gulf between them would be a landmark in any country.
As Ali mentioned, there is the sense that Peter saw Sylvia as an extension of that golden dream he was trying to attain. His intellectual rigor and her collegiate professor status matched. The women universally adored in whatever room they’re in. Peter’s self worth is tied up in external validation and status. It’s very mechanical and will not fix his self hatred.
That’s why I take umbrage with the blanket assertion that women fix men in this novel: maybe Ivan, I don’t care, but do you really believe that the unconventional relationship Peter has with these women won’t blow up in his face?
Something I would have liked from this novel: Christine’s point of view. Neither Ivan nor Peter seem to be able to view her as she is and their hatred for her seems formless without a clear reason. Sure, she prioritised herself. Got a divorce, many people do.
Her comforting Peter doesn’t match the conniving, borderline Machiavellian nature that both view her with. As if she’s someone who’d skin a poor hapless pet at the squeak of a chance. She’s acting like a normal mother in that instance, not overly concerned but not distant either.
The hatred directed at her is unsubstantiated and her irritation at taking care of a dog is like, okay she’s not a dog person. The absence of her grief, of her interiority and how she views the people her children have become is an oversight that would have rounded out this novel and strengthened it.
This book is neat. It's alright, if a bit forgettable. The style doesn't invite emotional attachment. The parallels set up between Ivan and Peter are, well, sad to see. Neither character grows to the extent that they won't be hampered by what it is that alienates them wholly. Sylvia's perspective would have bettered it or more confrontations rather than meandering introspection.
A love letter to planet earth. The structure yields depth upon the recognition of what it is, and upon what axis the world really turns on.
This book is remarkable in its execution of a concept of deceptive scale: that of seeing the world anew in a world where we can look up a marble-clouded photo of earth in a matter of seconds.
The language is lovely, not an effusive bouquet but an approach appropriate for the scale of the scope—that of our entire world. It is a novel that centres space but space only insofar as it relates to humanity and home.
It traces the past of how each of the four astronauts and two cosmonauts came to be, what they leave behind, and how they remake themselves and each other while in exactly where they want to be yet there is a taut tension only felt when gravity reasserts itself with mortality. Tension that would have weight on earth loses grip in the timeless quality of space.
The atmosphere is aloof and sometimes a little like an absent god.
Sometimes it is close, as with this narration:
Some of the character beats were a little trite, a little too played out without an execution that does something with the material. However there was a mint line that distinguished itself, an elision between perspectives and demonstrated a sentimentality for earth rather than people precisely because the people viewed each other unreliably, saw placeholders in the other and chafed at circumstance; a dearth of choice.
The metaphor about Las Meninas, a 17th-century Spanish painting, is charming. Sometimes we love someone and the way they look at the world reframes yours.
Reading Orbital made me realise how deeply woeful my geography seriously is. I recently reread a story, one focused on language barriers and Xi’an, that refreshed this feeling and extended it: that strange quality of the world being smaller than it should rationally be received. Essentially, I need to be reading more, more always and in corners and genres and movements unknown to myself. I want to read more and know the world as Harvey alludes to. It is incomprehensibly large and the comfortabilty I’ve felt is due to paddling in shallow waters and thinking it destiny.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
This novel overflows with ennui. I still don’t know what to say about this novel that has probably not already been said. It’s definitely a novel. It’s certainly a book.
Although inhabiting the usual haunts of a novel, it feels formless and detached from that; umbilical cord sundered, a distant relative evolved along similar paths to present traits close enough to trick the lay person into an evidence deficient conclusion that it is one. It is and isn’t in the ordinary sense of the word.
It took a third of the book to acclimatise to Rooney’s style. It requires little emotional effort to read, and sometimes I had to double back because reading it felt like dipping your hand into water, the quality of the water itself more interesting than the path it was taking.
It’s somewhat difficult to say what this book elicits because it doesn’t feel like it does much of that. The ruminations on difficult familial relationships are well trod, spool of grief playing second fiddle to their relationships with the women in their life. I understand what compels people about Rooney but the focus on distinctly male misery to the supplantation of all else doesn’t enamour me.
Ivan, as a character, was fine. I liked Margaret more than him but that’s not especially difficult of a feat. His chapters had fewer lines that I bookmarked. His interiority was a lot of circling around in a fruitless manner for meaning and an answer that would fit his understanding of the world. His development over the course of the book was neither compelling nor unexpected. His internal justifications were rooted in a distinct lack of empathy and an unwillingness to observe the reality for what it was, instead retreating to frittering about vacuous truths and the elisions between truth and its absence.
His development maps closer to common criticisms of the book: Women are meant to fix men, The Bechdel test is failed and we’re locked in 2016. Sure, if you count emotional stuntedness as healing despite an immature wallowing to a fight that looms over the novel, not for its importance but because Ivan is categorically unable to move past it so the novel has to belabour it. Tedium grows fallow.
Peter, however, is a much funnier character to read. The number of lines highlighted from his chapters is a testament to his ability to mine his misery for mighty little lines that trace the contours of the internal workings of his mind. His preoccupation, seemingly, is that he’s torn between two beautiful women, oh no! but what he really wrangles with is his self-hatred. It annihilates him.
His unconscious desire for meaning leads Peter to assume the role preordained for him, provider and consummate defender of the weak and ailing and defenceless, but alienates him entirely from others. His strand of misogyny is far more interesting in that it almost seems unintentional, that it is patriarchy calcified. He never asks either Naomi or Sylvia how they should proceed, seeks Sylvia for intellectual affirmation and out of a need to pick at a wound unhealed, assumes flippant financial responsibility for Naomi and is tortured by his failure to meaningfully connect with Ivan until the end of the novel.
Margaret and Ivan’s relationship is of no concern. It exists and is perfectly fine. That she exists and mends Ivan’s misogynistic rhetoric by the simple miracle of her existence is, like, okay we’re really leading people into easy castigations of the novel. I like Margaret enough, and she seems decently humanised by both male narrators. I’d say she seems more human than Sylvia who is mythologised and imbued with an almost holy reverence throughout the text. Peter fails to see Sylvia and Sylvia is withdrawn, their relationship cold and distant. It is not distant in the conventional sense but the gulf between them would be a landmark in any country.
As Ali mentioned, there is the sense that Peter saw Sylvia as an extension of that golden dream he was trying to attain. His intellectual rigor and her collegiate professor status matched. The women universally adored in whatever room they’re in. Peter’s self worth is tied up in external validation and status. It’s very mechanical and will not fix his self hatred.
That’s why I take umbrage with the blanket assertion that women fix men in this novel: maybe Ivan, I don’t care, but do you really believe that the unconventional relationship Peter has with these women won’t blow up in his face?
Something I would have liked from this novel: Christine’s point of view. Neither Ivan nor Peter seem to be able to view her as she is and their hatred for her seems formless without a clear reason. Sure, she prioritised herself. Got a divorce, many people do.
Her comforting Peter doesn’t match the conniving, borderline Machiavellian nature that both view her with. As if she’s someone who’d skin a poor hapless pet at the squeak of a chance. She’s acting like a normal mother in that instance, not overly concerned but not distant either.
The hatred directed at her is unsubstantiated and her irritation at taking care of a dog is like, okay she’s not a dog person. The absence of her grief, of her interiority and how she views the people her children have become is an oversight that would have rounded out this novel and strengthened it.
This book is neat. It's alright, if a bit forgettable. The style doesn't invite emotional attachment. The parallels set up between Ivan and Peter are, well, sad to see. Neither character grows to the extent that they won't be hampered by what it is that alienates them wholly. Sylvia's perspective would have bettered it or more confrontations rather than meandering introspection.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
A love letter to planet earth. The structure yields depth upon the recognition of what it is, and upon what axis the world really turns on.
This book is remarkable in its execution of a concept of deceptive scale: that of seeing the world anew in a world where we can look up a marble-clouded photo of earth in a matter of seconds.
The language is lovely, not an effusive bouquet but an approach appropriate for the scale of the scope—that of our entire world. It is a novel that centres space but space only insofar as it relates to humanity and home.
It traces the past of how each of the four astronauts and two cosmonauts came to be, what they leave behind, and how they remake themselves and each other while in exactly where they want to be yet there is a taut tension only felt when gravity reasserts itself with mortality. Tension that would have weight on earth loses grip in the timeless quality of space.
The atmosphere is aloof and sometimes a little like an absent god.
Sometimes it is close, as with this narration:
Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold. It's the desire - no, the need (fuelled by fervour) - to protect this huge yet tiny earth.
Some of the character beats were a little trite, a little too played out without an execution that does something with the material. However there was a mint line that distinguished itself, an elision between perspectives and demonstrated a sentimentality for earth rather than people precisely because the people viewed each other unreliably, saw placeholders in the other and chafed at circumstance; a dearth of choice.
The metaphor about Las Meninas, a 17th-century Spanish painting, is charming. Sometimes we love someone and the way they look at the world reframes yours.
Reading Orbital made me realise how deeply woeful my geography seriously is. I recently reread a story, one focused on language barriers and Xi’an, that refreshed this feeling and extended it: that strange quality of the world being smaller than it should rationally be received. Essentially, I need to be reading more, more always and in corners and genres and movements unknown to myself. I want to read more and know the world as Harvey alludes to. It is incomprehensibly large and the comfortabilty I’ve felt is due to paddling in shallow waters and thinking it destiny.
