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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A-,
This review is from: Disquiet (Penguin Original) (Paperback)
Julia Leigh's novella is a series of glimpses into the lives of a family haunted by secrets both past and present. It is a nouveau-gothic tale that has the tone of an old horror story but has elements of modern living (a dead baby is stored in a state-of-the-art freezer). Nothing is ever fully explained, and the author skillfully tells a story almost solely through visuals. There is little dialogue, and when it occurs it is terse and gives away nothing. What we see is a carefully chosen selection of images designed to unsettle and put the reader on alert. But this alert is never fully realized, so that the denouement comes off as a bit of a letdown. There is a sense of a parallel universe, that the characters exist on a plateau that is slightly off-kilter to ours. Nothing truly scary happens, but the little things - a still lake, a shed with old canoes, a high heel used to crush a phone jack - build into a frenzy of beautiful lyricism and will leave the reader feeling haunted for days. Indeed, every image conveyed by Leigh is designed to keep itself stored in the memories of the reader, so that this novella will never quite go away. The prose is wonderfully rich, and the characters leap off the page, fully-formed in just a mere 120 pages. Disquiet tells a simple story that has a slight plot, but it pulls its weight in highly developed atmosphere and the author clearly has a gift for story-telling.
12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
What a large disappointment and for such a short book,
This review is from: Disquiet (Penguin Original) (Paperback)
Spoiler Alert! I read the reviews for this book and was so hopeful. The modern-gothic tone grabbed me the first couple of pages in the bookstore, so I bought the book. It's a lovely little book to hold in your hand and there are more than a few spare, hauntingly gorgeous little scenes throughout. But by around page 80 or so, whenever you hit the couple of pages where she uses the word ancient three or four times very close together, the jig is up. Spare and haunting now just seems like lazy writing and bizarre in a very silly way. From here you begin to question everything that went before as far as the writing itself goes. And the cool, creepy first scene with the boy kicking down that door--paired with the last page, you'd think the boy had been the novella's child protagonist (the woman is the primary one); but the boy had only a very small supporting role throughout. The sister-in-law, Marcus's wife with her bundle of grief, took the novel over . . . and seemed not at all herself at the end when the woman (deus ex machina, here) finally buries her decomposing little corpse. All of the mysteries--about the woman's abusive relationship that she was running away from, the Murder she refers to, her own crazy family history--why she ran away from home--are never resolved in the least. A most disappointing and unsatisfying read with seemingly bloated positive reviews. Could have been a great book in a more talented and/or more conscientious and ambitious writer's hands.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
wonderfully atmospheric,
By
This review is from: Disquiet (Penguin Original) (Paperback)
I disagree very strongly with the single, negative reviewer of this book posted up on this site -- actually, it is the only non-glowing review of this marvellous little tale that i have come across online. And i looked at a dozen or more reviews. (Leigh is a widely admired author whose fans include Toni Morrison, Simon Schama, and others). Leigh's latest novella is a beautifully written and marvellously atmospheric story whose central theme, for me at least, is the loss of loved ones--the loss of a partner, the loss of a parent, and perhaps most distressingly here, the loss of a child. Everyone we meet in this book has lost something or someone. But in Leigh's deft and unsentimental authorial hands this powerful material is far more deeply psychological than sad, more alluringly gothic-strange than expository as a series of ever more bizarre events unfold during an impromptu gathering of family at an old chataeu --a dead baby is stored in a freezer; an unidentified man continuouslly calls on the phone, and a woman watches indifferently as a pair of children seem ready to drown in a pond. The prose is rich, lyrical and spare, making the subject matter even more haunting and the characters even more memorable. Leigh is smart and easily talented enough as a writer to be able to brilliantly hold everything in suspense for the reader, with the dark tension beckoning you onward. This is a clever, engaging and marvellously evocative book which makes you feel like you are there, in this place, watching her well-drawn characters interact. I cannot recall a book in recent times in which the imagery is so vivid.
Ben
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