what I read last week
intermezzo, on desperate ground
Good afternoon!
This past week has been all over the place — I may have indulged in a lot of television to make it through election week. I also finished an old Hampton Sides book, On Desperate Ground, about the Korean War and finally distilled my thoughts on Intermezzo. Let’s get into it.
What I read:
On Desperate Ground: The Marines at the Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle by Hampton Sides
On Desperate Ground chronicles the Battle of Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, when the U.S. Marines fought their way out of the frozen mountains of North Korea in late November and early December of 1950.
Sides begins this book by sketching out the main U.S. commanders and providing some context for the Korean War and the months leading up to Chosin. Following World War II, the Soviet Union and the USA divided Korea (which had been a Japanese colony for thirty-five years) into occupation zones. The northern and southern zones later formed their own governments in 1948. In late June 1950, the Soviet-backed Korean People’s Army launched a southern invasion and nearly defeated the southern troops and allies in just two months.
General Douglas MacArthur, seventy years old and the five-star general famous for his command of the Allied troops in the Pacific Theater during WWII, was put in charge of the United Nations Troops in Korea. President Truman gave MacArthur a broad mandate with little oversight. “We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically,” Defense Secretary George Marshall cabled to MacArthur.
MacArthur planned and executed a bold amphibious assault at the port of Inchon in September 1950. Inchon turned the tide of the war by cutting the North Korean troops in half, and it was a resounding success.
But after these early victories, MacArthur seemed to take his eye off the battlefield. MacArthur had become increasingly obsessed with public adoration and had developed an inflated sense of his own opinions in the years after WWII. “It was as though he had become the emperor, and a touchy one at that, jealous of his routines and creature comforts, microscopically attentive to the trappings of power and the nuances of publicity,” Sides writes. MacArthur’s narcissism and hubris would prove to have disastrous consequences for the U.N. and American troops.
In early October 1950, Mao Zedong warned U.S. forces not to go north of the 38th parallel. MacArthur considered this a bluff and dismissed it as “Red propaganda.” When President Truman and General MacArthur met on October 15 to discuss the Korean War on Wake Island, a Pacific atoll, MacArthur assured Truman that the Chinese would not interfere and the conflict would be over by Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, more than 200,000 Chinese troops were crossing the border into Korea.
MacArthur ignored the intelligence regarding Chinese involvement and ordered his troops to rush north to the Chinese border, a move which he believed would “for all practical purposes end the war.” Under the command of Oliver P. Smith, the 1st Marine Division arrived at the Chosin Reservoir and found themselves surrounded by more than 150,000 Chinese troops. They were outnumbered and in a hostile environment, with temperatures falling to 25 degrees below zero. “MacArthur had blundered badly,” Sides writes. “He had been outwitted and outflanked by a guerrilla army with no air force, crude logistics, and primitive communications, an army with no tanks and precious little artillery. He was responsible for one of the most egregious intelligence failures in American military history.”
Against all odds, the troops fought their way out and retreated 70 miles to the sea. Sides reconstructs the gruesome details of the seventeen-day battle and focuses primarily on the 1st Marine Division. The vivid battle scenes are not for the faint of heart. Sides details how one Marine lost an eyeball and “mashed it back into its ragged hole.” As part of their retreat, U.S. troops airdropped bridge sections from Japan to construct a makeshift bridge at Koto-ri and used frozen corpses to secure the bridge.
In the end, an astonishingly large number of U.S. Marines survived this harrowing retreat. About 750 Marines died, and 30,000 Chinese soldiers were killed. MacArthur viewed the evacuation as a success and took no responsibility for his intelligence failures. Truman fired MacArthur the following year.
I picked up this book after reading Hampton Sides’s recent novel on Captain Cook. Like Sides’s other book, I could not put this one down. On Desperate Ground is an exceptionally written narrative nonfiction work that reads like a movie. I also appreciated the broader historical context he provided, as I have not read that much on the Korean War (U.S. history textbooks seem to skip over the years between WWII and the Vietnam War).
While On Desperate Ground is a story of endurance and survival against all odds in wartime by the Marines, it is also an illustration of the blunders of leadership and narcissism on the part of MacArthur. I recommend this book to anyone interested in narrative nonfiction or military history.
Rating: 4.5/5
Genre: Nonfiction (Historical Narrative; Military History)
Page count: 337 pages
Audio: 12 hours and 7 minutes
Movie/TV pairings: Devotion (one of the few U.S. movies set during the Korean War — Sides mentions this story in his book)
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
Intermezzo follows two brothers living in contemporary Dublin. Ivan Koubek, 22, is a shy and awkward “chess genius” with an undergraduate degree in theoretical physics, and Peter, 32, is an attractive and successful human rights lawyer. Ivan and Peter are grieving their father’s death and are struggling to navigate romantic relationships. Rooney writes as a third-person omniscient narrator with multiple points of view, alternating between the two siblings and their lovers.
Ivan begins dating Margaret, who is 36 and works as a director of a local arts center. Ivan and Margaret meet when he competes at a chess competition at the center. Rooney’s writing style for Ivan reflects his anxious rambling, and Margaret’s perspective is filled with clear, crisp prose and quiet self-reflection. Ivan’s chess career has stagnated, and he struggles to support himself as a freelance data analyst. Margaret is separated from her alcoholic husband, who is beloved by her family, and asks herself, “What’s the point in pretending my life makes any sense anyway?” Margaret and Ivan start a tender, awkward romance but keep their age-gap relationship a secret because they worry their friends and family will ridicule them.
Ivan’s brother, Peter, has his own conflicts. Although Peter has found success professionally, he is in a depressive spiral fueled by Xanax and alcohol. Rooney writes Peter’s chapters in a Joycean staccato monologue: “Thoughts rattling and noisy almost always and then when quiet frighteningly unhappy. Mentally not right maybe. Never maybe was.”
Peter worries a lot about how others perceive him. Although he wants to be a traditional, monogamous man (he’d rather “be thought a cheater than some kind of freak”), he is privately involved with two women. For months, he has had a sexual and “quietly financial relationship” with Naomi, a 23-year-old university student who lounges around eating Doritos and sometimes posts photos on the internet to support herself. Peter is also in love with Sylvia Larkin, a 32-year-old professor of modern literature who broke up with Peter six years ago after she was in a debilitating car accident that left her unable to have penetrative sex. Rooney follows these relationships and Ivan and Peter’s complex sibling dynamics.
I was one of those slightly embarrassing people who thought Normal People was life-changing. I could not have been more excited for Intermezzo, especially after reading Rooney’s incredible excerpt in The New Yorker of Ivan and Margaret meeting and seeing the generally rave reviews it has received. But I have pretty mixed feelings about this book.
What did I like about it? “Intermezzo” basically means a pause — a quieter composition between acts of opera, a palate cleanser, or an unexpected chess move. The Koubek brothers are in a type of intermezzo, trying to survive this in-between period as they mourn their father. All of the characters are grappling with inflection points in their lives and careers. Ivan’s chess career has stalled. Margaret has not quite moved on from her husband. Sylvia and Peter are not together but still deeply in love. Margaret, Peter, and Sylvia are approaching a new phase of their lives in their 30s.
Intermezzo is at its best when Rooney focuses on the tense dynamic between Peter and Ivan. They both view each other as villains and misperceive one another. Rooney eloquently describes one particularly volatile sibling interaction at a dinner:
In a deliberately quiet almost hissing voice Ivan says: I actually hate you. I’ve hated you my entire life.
Without stirring, without looking around to see whether the other diners or staff are watching them, Peter just answers: I know.
The characters feel the most real in these moments, and Rooney captures tension and social anxiety very well.
What irritated me? While I liked parts of this book, it also frustrated me. At 448 pages, Intermezzo is considerably longer than Rooney’s earlier novels, like Normal People (304 pages) and Conversations with Friends (336 pages). It felt both overlong (Peter’s love triangle quickly grew tiresome) and too short.
Many of these characters seemed underdeveloped. This book is ultimately about grief, but Rooney never paints a vivid portrait of who the Koubek father was or what the father-son relationships were really like. Ivan and Peter also have a complex relationship with their mother and step-siblings, but the reasons for those dynamics are never fully explored or explained.
The characters’ interests and careers are mentioned but never really given any depth. Ivan is a chess prodigy, but chess does not seem to affect his life much, other than the two competition scenes in this novel and the time he spends on his phone playing chess. Peter is a human rights lawyer who also randomly lectures in “EU Competition Law.” Rooney implies that Naomi is a sex worker but never digs into what that exactly means (she just writes that Naomi sometimes sells “photos” of herself online) or what that is like for Naomi.
The female characters, in particular, seemed one-dimensional and cliché. Rooney constantly stresses that Margaret, at age 36, is an old maid. Peter’s lovers, Sylvia and Naomi, fit into the neat archetypes of Madonna and the whore — Sylvia is basically celibate, an asexual academic, and brash Naomi appears to exist just to fulfill Peter’s sexual needs. I rolled my eyes when reading that Naomi “wants to watch a compilation of snooker shots you’ll never believe, and [Peter] wants to watch Alfred Brendel playing Mozart’s Sonata No. 14 in C Minor.” Naomi and Sylvia seem like sacrificial pieces in Peter’s character development. We never really know them as people — Naomi feels particularly flat, and I kept wondering what she actually thought about Peter.
Sylvia’s vague medical condition also distracted me. We never learn what exactly is wrong with her or what happened in the “road traffic accident” that has rendered her unable to have penetrative sex. Her condition was so vague that I found it distracting. As one reviewer pointed out, Rooney went into depth about Francis’s endometriosis in Conversations with Friends, so it’s odd that she doesn’t provide any information here. This portrayal of Sylvia’s disability also seems like a backward way of discussing a disability/medical condition.
Rooney varies her writing style throughout the novel and primarily focuses on Ivan, Margaret, and Peter. I found Ivan’s chapters the most compelling; she does a good job sympathetically capturing the anxieties of an awkward young man. Peter’s parts feel like an odd imitation of Joyce. Peter’s narration and scrambled syntax just slowed the book down for me. I completely agree with this review that pointed out that the narrator sounded more like Yoda than Joyce at times:
“Tea they had given her.”
“Empty the city feels.”
“Dark her lips slightly parted.”
I think books like The Bee Sting or Milkman (which I had mixed feelings about) do a better job playing with syntax, perspective, and Joycean language.
What about Marxism? Sally Rooney is a self-admitted Marxist, and several articles have been written about the Marxist themes in Intermezzo. A few years ago, Rooney discussed her views. She is wary of the “culture economy” and marketing books “like beautiful items that you can fill your shelves with and therefore become a sort of book person.” While she does not maintain that she writes “Marxist books,” she says that her viewpoints come up in the interactions between the characters, like how we cannot get away from the fundamentally “transactional nature of relationships.”
It is difficult to take these comments too seriously, especially given all of the swag sold at Intermezzo launch parties (including stickers, quizzes, puzzles, bookmarks, and tote bags). However, I can see some of Rooney’s views in Intermezzo. Naomi’s relationship with Peter feels very transactional — he literally gives her a place to stay after she is evicted. Purely “capitalist” characters are peripheral and are skewered by Rooney. I laughed when I read this review in The Times discussing Darren, the stepbrother of Ivan and Peter:
If Sally Rooney’s new novel, Intermezzo, can be said to have a villain — besides that looming, much-mentioned nemesis in all her books, global capitalism — it is probably a minor character named Darren. The [step]-brother of the protagonists Ivan and Peter, Darren “works for a corporate law firm, earning a massive salary and contributing zero, literally nothing at all to human civilisation”. He is encountered on a modern “housing development with [a] big engraved rock outside”. Here, residents enjoy such dubious pleasures as “synthetic fragrances” and “polished marble countertops”. Darren doesn’t look after his brothers’ dog well and, worst of all, makes a clueless appearance at a moment of emotional high drama “wearing a polo shirt with an embroidered brand logo on the front, and a pair of plastic flip-flops for some reason”. Come on, Darren, dress for the occasion.
Darren starkly contrasts with Peter, a human rights lawyer, and Ivan, who worries about overpopulation and whose refusal to travel by air is “environmentally motivated.”
Overall, I think the Marxist parallels are a little overblown. Some reviewers have argued that the communist idea evident in Rooney’s novels is that “ordinary people should also be allowed the tumults and comforts of an emotional life, along with a sense that their existence is important because it is precious to the people they love.” This seems like a stretch here — surely, many books fall into this category. Yes, there still is a massive market for escapist billionaire romance novels, but countless books portray ordinary people having complex emotional lives and falling in love.
So do I recommend it? Overall, I would not really recommend Intermezzo. Maybe I am just getting older and am growing tired of the miscommunication trope, but these characters felt very flat. An interesting (but not groundbreaking) writing style did not make up for these characters or the plot.
If you do not care about being part of the pop culture discourse around this book, I think that it is fine to skip it.
Rating: 2.5/5
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Page count: 448 pages
Audio: 16 hours 29 minutes
Articles and tv shows I cannot stop thinking about:
“Rivals review – even the naked tennis scene is a triumph” in The Guardian
I have been loving the escapism of Rivals on Hulu. It is an adaptation of the infamous 1980s novel by Jilly Cooper about the ultra-wealthy in the Cotswolds fighting over a TV franchise.
“Martha Stewart Gives Netflix’s ‘Martha’ a Scalding Review” in The New York Times
I have also been watching the new Martha documentary on Netflix. Martha’s life is fascinating, and I thought a lot about her and Ina after reading Ina Garten’s memoir last week.
Martha did not like the second half of this documentary. I enjoyed it, but I agree with Martha that they spent too long on her insider trading scandal and prison stint.
What I cooked:
Spaghetti and meatballs
Rao’s meatball recipe: Sadly, this recipe was not great — I am still searching for the best red sauce meatball recipe!
An Italian meal salad
Nancy’s chopped salad: This recipe is one of my all-time favorite meal salads. It is a classic acidic Italian chopped salad.
A lamb and halloumi meal
Minty meatballs with cabbage and tahini: This recipe is surprisingly pretty easy — you roast the cabbage in an oven on a baking sheet.
Halloumi, cucumber, and walnut spoon salad: This salad is the perfect side dish and makes an amazing leftover meal with some pita.