Julia LeighRezensionen
Autor von Disquiet
Rezensionen
Disturbing. Themes of infant loss and delusions. Sophie is a nightmare woman. The children were very well written. I like these points because they fuel the uneasiness of the narrative.
I didn't like how inconclusive everything was. There were too many little things being touched on once and then forgotten or left unexplored. It was like someone was trying to shove as many triggers into my face without any real purpose. The ending was also really lackluster/rushed. Not my favorite.
Disquiet by Julia Leigh is a creepy novella. It’s a disjointed, disconnected story about people who are disconnect from one another as well as themselves. It’s a story full of symbolism and foreshadowing (of a sort).
It’s one of those books that cause people to say Leigh is a “writer’s writer.” Toni Morrison, J.M. Coetzee, and Don DeLillo have blurbs on the book, so there you have it.
I came across Disquiet on my local library shelves while browsing for thin books to consider for Dewey’s 24 Hour Read-A-Thon. When I saw that Leigh is Australian it was a definite book to check out to read for the Australian Woman Writers Challenge (see #AAWW2014 if you’re on Twitter).
***some spoilers below***
The story begins with Olivia returning to her mother’s house in rural France with her two children in tow, a boy and a girl, Andrew and Lucy. The boy bloodies himself following his mother’s instruction to kick down an old secret garden door to get onto the estate. Andrew repeatedly throws his body against the door, "he made himself brutal" for his mother.
Mother is obviously wealthy. She is not a warm French mother, but cold and distant. Olivia is fleeing from her abusive Australian husband whom she still loves, but he obviously crossed a line in her mind because after the last beating not only did he bruise her body, he broke her arm.
The estate has three house servants who take care of the family, one who’s been with them forever,
two who are young twin sisters. There are also gardeners who maintain the grounds. The house itself is a huge structure complete with secret passageways that are no longer in use and taken over by spider webs. It’s like a Gothic version of Downton Abbey set in contemporary France.
The same afternoon of Olivia's homecoming, her brother and his wife, Marcus and Sophie, who live with Mother, are due home any minute with their first born. They’ve had a hard time conceiving and maintaining a pregnancy. Alas, they come home with a stillborn who they’ve named Alice. Sophie won’t let the infant go and resists burial for way too long claiming they want to get to know Alice. No one can convince her to bury the body—not her husband, not her mother-in-law, not the church, not the government. But she’s named after the traditional figure of Wisdom, Sophia, so there’s some rich, subtext to parse out here in the context of this uptight, dysfunctional family.
Meanwhile, Marcus is carrying on his affair with another woman over his cellphone and even has a bit of phone sex while Andrew watches from the boat house.
I kept expecting someone to die (in addition to Alice), someone to murder someone, someone to go off the deep end.
In the end, the character who resonated with me the most is the son, Andrew. He longs to get back to his father in Sydney and plots an escape, taking his sister along. It fails and he ends up saving his sister's and his mother's lives. His story seems a bit like Unhealthy Gender Stereotype Conditioning 101: rip a boy away from his abusive father, trap him in an atmosphere of smothering repression, don't give him any means of communication with his dad, but then have him do your dirty work. He thinks his mother is beautiful now, but you can feel the day coming when he'll turn on his mother in ways much bigger than average teenage independence. Perhaps he'll become an abusive husband or the guy who masturbates on the cell phone in his mom's backyard where he still lives with his emotionally disturbed wife. But maybe not. He doesn't know it yet, but he'll soon be off to boarding school, and perhaps that'll save him from this loveless family.
It's not a pretty world that Leigh creates, but if feels real. Disquiet is some great writing that keeps you guessing and wondering and filling in the gaps.
Whoakay.... Well. The cover is pretty. And the opening sequence had some promise. But I don't think I would've missed anything if I hadn't read this.
Adult fiction. Short, enjoyable, unsettling novella.
An ecocentric story, it contemplates the nature of mankind, wild animals and the wilderness. The writer doesn't 'develop' the main character as many stories do, but pulls you into his feelings, and detachment from the human world.
The subsequent movie and the book are very different, with different endings.
The writing is good. The words flow with the smoothness of a slow, deep river.
The central character however? For a book so concentrated on one person, it gives little insight into his inner workings. Motivations and emotions are so lightly touched on that his actions are merely that. We watch him go about his task, and that's it. I was interested in seeing what would eventuate, but I didn't connect with him.
Halfway through the book, I turned to my wife and said "the main character kind of sucks, but I think that's the point." If this had been written by a man, I would have chalked the whole thing up to a misogynist creating a mouthpiece in M and putting him through some macho fantasy about killing the last thylacine and expecting us to cheer along with him. Instead, I ended up feeling a sense of loss and disappointment at the end, with the thylacine's death almost parallel to the Armstrong family's accident. (I gather that this is a common book for Australian students to read, so I'll let them analyze it further.)
I really liked the language. The plot had a lot of loose ends, but there was a general sense of resolution, if not a happy one. I keep wavering between 3 and 4 stars, but because it was such an immersive read I think 4 does it justice.
The hunter is well written and a page turner. There is a modicum of human interaction with others in this short novel, just enough to know what is going on inside of M's head. The story is disturbing and tense, bringing with it a whole host of questions and judgments inside of the reader's head as we see the workings of M's thoughts.
Yes, this novel is depressing. The brevity of it and the wonderful prose enabled me to finish it. I have not seen this movie and am not sure I could see it but I am curious how such a psychological novel could be made into a film.
The title is an apt one. That feeling that something was wrong pervaded the whole story--even with its somewhat positive ending. Actually, it was quite obvious that lots of things were wrong. There was no mystery. But the tone of the writing made it feel mysterious. The story is told so matter-of-factly, without emotion, that although you want things to turn out ok for the characters, you are never truly invested in their lives because there is this wall of indifference keeping you from empathizing with them. Very interesting.
(8.5)This beautifully packaged novella is aptly titled. The reader is indeed disquieted by the unfolding events in this story. I was intrigued from the outset and felt a sense of relief at the ending.
i was surprised to learn that this was an Australian author, given the French setting.
Despite its small size, this book packs quite a punch. The past and present collide in a mess of family ties and dissolving marriages. A morbid object never quite leaves even if most of the characters, and the reader, would prefer that it did. Nor does the memory of abuse, or the reality of infidelity. I highly suggest this book, especially if you like books that turn out to be more than they appear.
This review can also be found on my blog.
cw domestic abuse; stillbirth
I found this novella in a local thrift shop and picked it up on a whim. I thought the cover was nice and the story sounded interesting -- and told myself that even if I didn’t like it, I’d only be working through 120 or so pages. I’m glad I went for it because this is one of those hidden gems that I probably never would have found otherwise. It’s simply written, but hauntingly beautiful. It’s a little odd in a way I can’t put my finger on, but also in a way that really piqued my interest. I definitely recommend it and know I’ll be picking it up again sometime.
A novella that will take an hour or two to read, but that will stay with you for a long time! Exquisite writing, spare prose, disturbing images, and an author who leaves you wanting MORE! Very powerful and haunting.
I read Avalanche, a memella by Julia Leigh about her attempts to fall pregnant and have a child. It's an odd piece of writing, veering unevenly from emotion to clinicality (I'm just going to be making up all the words today), sometimes with nary a word between the shifts. A good first third details her marriage, which falls apart, and whose relevance to the rest of the tale could be shrunk to a single sentence (After we divorced and my ex-husband no longer wanted me to use his frozen sperm ...), which would eliminate the aren't-we-so-in-love-more-than-you-could-ever-be bits that read like two seventeen year olds lecturing their elders about how incandescent their love is. Oh, how easy it is to be in love at the start. Then you divorce and your ex-husband rescinds his frozen sperm and what are you to do then? You try with donors and write a memella about the process.
Wanting a child hurts. You could tell that. Leigh's yearning came through in the writing. Maybe it helped her to write it. It has the feeling of being personal, intimate, without artifice or performance for an audience. Leigh wrote it, she shared it, but it doesn't seem like she wrote it for the purpose of sharing, like for click-bait or to emotionally blackmail readers. She wrote it and put it out to the world, like a parent has a child and puts her out to the world. Avalanche isn't a child, but maybe it can be like the shadow of a child for Leigh. Not really shadow but like a hazy, dream image just before waking, from a daytime nap suspicion of a child. Those dreams where you find a secret door in your house and when you wake, for just a second, you think maybe there is a door there before realizing no, there isn't. There's no door. Like that, but for a child.
This memella uses the word childling more than once. I appreciate the use of this word probably more than I appreciate the memella. But I do appreciate giving literary space to women's issues. Flipping what's often said: I read the book I want to (at least spiritually) write.
Avalanche by Julia Leigh went on sale October 6, 2016.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Short, creepy and beautifully written, Disquiet wound up leaving me more puzzled than discomforted. It's a speedy read though, and Leigh is an excellent writer, whose sentences are enough to justify this otherwise odd book.
What little treat. Strange and quiet, but still pulled tight like spring with tension. It is easy to see why this was nominated for a Shirley Jackson -- that most of qualities where the book is neither terrifying nor horrific, there is not a ghost or a vampire in sight, no serial killers, no murders or murders -- yet still each moment is fraught, each breath you hear, and somewhere in the background of this very sad and strangely beautiful story, I could hear a large clock ticking. Even more strangely, a clock is never mentioned.
I picked this up partially because I didn't know anything about it and I kind of needed a book like that, partially because it was sent to me by a user I respect a great deal, because it's short, and because I've started trying to read more books written by women. Anyway, I opened it up blind, not realizing this was about a hunter's efforts to find and kill the last Tasmanian Tiger, believed to have gone extinct in 1936, or that there was a movie made about it.
The word to describe the reading experience is relentless. Although, actually I didn't notice anything special about it until the end. It's comes across a very simple and straight forward, with a few oddities and touches of humanity around and finally within in a machine like and almost inhuman hunter. But the ending - I'll avoid spoilers here - changed the book for me. There is a very sound and difficult logic to it. It left me suddenly uncomfortable and thinking, and bothered by the book in a way I wouldn't not have been if it had been presented another way. That is to say I couldn't have gotten the sense of the book in it's entirely without having experienced the whole book plus the ending. It all fits together as a interdependent experience - at least for this reader. I find something special in that.
2014
https://www.librarything.com/topic/172769#4712650
Drawn as fine as garotting wire, this suspense story twists and coils and springs dramatic images and unexpected events on the reader, somehow staying a total page-turner while being organized in short vignettes. This is a powerful author, and the book is powerful, though it operates subtly, so that the ending doesn't really finish with the turn of the last page.
Unfortunately, I hated all the characters except Josette. Each one had some horrible aspect that made all seem irredeemable. But if you don't mind your beauty being constructed from the scenes of lives of ugly people, and you do like Shirley Jackson, read this. - Okay, in fairness, the main character isn't irredeemable. Ambiguous, and it's hard to love her, but she is more than she seems at first.
Diese Seite verwendet Cookies für unsere Dienste, zur Verbesserung unserer Leistungen, für Analytik und (falls Sie nicht eingeloggt sind) für Werbung. Indem Sie LibraryThing nutzen, erklären Sie dass Sie unsere Nutzungsbedingungen und Datenschutzrichtlinie gelesen und verstanden haben. Die Nutzung unserer Webseite und Dienste unterliegt diesen Richtlinien und Geschäftsbedingungen.
I don't understand what I was supposed to get out of this, besides the fact that no one in this family could properly communicate with each other. I'd have cheered at the ending, except that everything that happened then should have happened way earlier. Preferably before the baby's corpse started decomposing.
Overall, this was a frustrating and weird read about people who generally made my skin crawl, and not in an entertaining or even terribly interesting way.
(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)