logged: butter by asako yuzuki
2: and intermezzo by sally rooney
Book 26 of 2024:
I was unsure what to think and expect going into the book but I’m glad I went into the book blindly. I wasn’t entirely blind; I knew the book was inspired by the real-life case of “The Konkatsu Killer”, and I was immediately intrigued by the premise that in Butter, a female journalist was meeting a woman accused of killing three men and who refused to speak to journalists, with a deep dislike for women in general. I went into it blindly in the sense that I hadn’t heard a single person around me talk about the story, and so I didn’t know if it was going to be an exciting thriller, a moody mystery, or a slower-paced, psychologically challenging, or perhaps a disturbing book.
I flew through the book with great curiosity, but it was more of a slow burner than a thrilling story. There was a lot of imagery and I enjoyed reading about the unravelling obsession, and picking up what felt like a nod towards society’s obsession with food, appearance, women, and killers. There were many characters as the story went on, but I had no trouble picking up what made each of them special in their way – however likeable or unlikeable they were. I enjoyed the story, though it took me a while through some slowly unfurling chapters, and then other times I found myself racing through others. Apart from a reoccurring vivid connection between food and emotion, there was something clever, almost haunting, laced into Butter.
Quotes:
“She was tired of living her life thinking constantly about how she appeared to others, checking her answers against everyone else’s.”
“By treating himself badly, he had accused the people around him.”
“Pleasantly full as she was, Rika felt like crying. She might dine with someone, but at the end of the meal they would go their separate ways. She couldn’t stay with that person forever. Even with her stomach full of warmth and the taste of delicious food lingering on her tongue, she remained alone. It didn’t matter who she had for company. She was beginning to understand that the more delicious the time she spent with others, the more alone she felt.”
“If you were accepted by just one person, then you didn’t need to be someone whose beauty was acknowledged by everyone.”
“In principle, all women should give themselves permission to demand good treatment, but the world made doing so profoundly difficult.”
“Don't you think that's a disease of the contemporary age? It feels like these days our value is determined by how much effort we make from day to day. That matters even more than our results. After a while, the concept of effort starts to become mixed up with things feeling difficult, and then you reach the point where the person seen as the most admirable is the one suffering the most. I think that's the reason people are so vicious towards Manako Kajii. She refuses to live that life, refuses to suffer.”
“If I stopped moving, then I wouldn’t be loved. And if I was the one moving, then I had no proof that I was loved. What did it mean to be loved, in any case? Was it to be needed? Why, then, when I was helping people in this way, did I feel this hollow and miserable?”
“Rika knew that to get herself out of this place, she had to traverse the bewilderingly long path towards the light. To do so, she had to line up the lowest hurdles she could find, and jump them. Starting by calling upon the people she felt able to call on.”
Book 27 of 2024:
This one took me a surprisingly long time to finish. As someone who adores Sally Rooney’s work ever since I dove into Normal People (multiple times, and a couple of re-watches of the series), I was taken out of Intermezzo more often than I would like to admit. I’m wondering if it was my lifestyle then that caused the interruptions, and whether there could have been a better timing for me to read it.
Contrary to many reviews I’ve come across on Intermezzo, I actually liked all points of view, including Peter’s! The writing style in his parts felt just how I imagined his mind to feel like, and I’ve always praised Rooney for clutching me by the pearls and dragging me along with her characters, no matter how much or how little I would end up liking them. I would have liked more of Naomi and Sylvia, but their characters felt achingly real even from the brothers’ points of view alone.
Intermezzo is an intimate exploration of quiet connection – at its core, asking: What does it mean to know and love someone? Intermezzo felt more mature than her other books, and was obviously grief-stricken, already hinted in the premise. It explored nuances of intimacy and grief that were tender and challenging, vulnerable and as contradicting as life can be. There is no real plot, and there’s no neat resolution, but it celebrates the imperfect nature of human relationships, which is oftentimes a manifestation of everything unsaid.
Quotes:
“But it is a pleasure, isn't it, on a crisp September night in Dublin to walk with long free strides along a quiet street. In the prime of his life. Incumbent on him now to enjoy such fleeting pleasures. Next minute might die. Happens every day to someone.”
“What if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?”
“Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you.”
“Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved.”
“You can drive yourself crazy thinking about different things you could have done in the past.”
“Yes, the world makes room for goodness and decency, he thinks: and the task of life is to show goodness to others, not to complain about their failings.”
“We’re being hard on ourselves in a way, he remarks, because both our lives involve some voluntary exposure to what other people might call defeat. Which I think requires a certain degree of courage.”
“Well, if that's suffering, he thinks, let me suffer. Yes. To love whoever I have left. And if ever I lose someone, let me descend into a futile and prolonged rage, yes, despair, wanting to break things, furniture, appliances, wanting to get into fights, to scream, to walk in front of a bus, yes. Let me suffer, please. To love just these few people, to know myself capable of that, I would suffer every day of my life.”
“To do what little good he can with his life. To ask for nothing more, to bow his head, pitifully grateful, God’s humble and grateful servant. Can he imagine anything less like himself? And yet here he is, defeated, relieved, forgiving everything, praying only to be forgiven.”
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This is such a great review, hannah. You have penned down a lot of my thoughts on the book.
i fear we have the same reading taste hannah and I'm seething with jealousy that you got to these books before me. i want to read butter so bad and now thanks to you it's next on my reading list, to end the year on a possibly high note. I haven't dove into intermezzo yet (i still have her previous book beautiful world where are you dusting on my shelf) but i need it so bad it's eyeing me whenever i go into a book store. great reviews as always, love <3