Olivia arrives at her mother?s chateau in rural France (the first time in more than a decade) with her two young children in tow. Soon the family is joined by Olivia?s brother Marcus and his wife Sophie?but this reunion is far from joyful. After years of desperately wanting a baby, Sophie has just given birth to a stillborn child, and she is struggling to overcome her devastation. Meanwhile, Olivia wrestles with her own secrets about the cruel and violent man she married many years before. Exquisitely written and reminiscent of Ian McEwan and J. M. Coetzee, Disquiet is a darkly beautiful and atmospheric story that will linger in the mind long after the final page is turned.
Disquiet (Penguin Original)
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Leigh follows her internationally acclaimed The Hunter with a haunting family drama tightly packed into a tense novella. Olivia, referred to primarily (and somewhat affectedly) as the woman, has fled her abusive husband with her two sharp-tongued young children. She seeks refuge at her mother's chateau in France, which she left on bad terms to get married 12 years earlier. Soon after Olivia's unexpected arrival, her brother shows up with his wife, Sophie, and the body of their stillborn child. Although the plot feels a bit slight, there is great emotional weight and disturbing imagery, as Sophie wanders aimlessly, still wearing her hospital ID bracelet and carrying her lifeless daughter in her arms as if the baby were a doll. The chateau is an ideal gothic setting for the morbid events that occur over the course of several days; indeed, there is only one scene that takes place off the chateau's grounds, infusing the novel with an unsettling atmosphere of claustrophobia. Death and impending death reign, but Leigh also paints a subtle portrait of a broken family trying to piece itself back together. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The New Yorker
Leigh�s first novel was a miracle of compression, a swift, muscular tale of a hunter tracking a near-mythic beast. Here she attempts the same radical economy of language with a more gothic, cluttered story, involving a woman on the run from her abusive husband; two preternaturally knowing children; a rambling French ch�teau staffed by giggly twin maids; and a philanderer who acquiesces to his grieving wife�s refusal to bury their stillborn baby. Characters are only intermittently identified by name, and every event�a boy hiding behind a curtain, the puncturing of a balloon�is rendered portentous. The result, despite bursts of gorgeously unhinged prose (�suitcases disembowelled,� tops of trees like �iron filings drawn starward�), is technically accomplished but airless.
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Copyright ©2008
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A-,
This review is from: Disquiet (Penguin Original) (Mass Market 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.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
wonderfully atmospheric,
By
This review is from: Disquiet (Penguin Original) (Mass Market 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
11 of 15 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) (Mass Market 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.
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