Even looking at my copy of Disquiet gives me the creeps. It's so incredibly sinister. The lead character - "the woman" - is cold and detached, bruised literally and metaphorically by a violent relationship. She returns with her children to the loveless home of her upbringing. There, a fresh nightmare awaits her: her brother and his wife Sophie return from hospital with a stillborn baby which she refuses to give up for burial, and which 'sleeps' on a satin pillow in the freezer. Gradually the horror of the situation engulfs the whole family. Eventually, the woman, like Sophie, also has to make a choice between love and death, between her pain and her children.
I think the book is an incredible piece of work, a dark masterpiece of atmosphere, with surprising emotional depth for a book so short and so macabre. I'd be very intrigued, if any of you read it, to hear your thoughts...
Employee gets laid off due to extreme body odor: ‘I genuinely felt bad for
him. He had only just started the job and hadn’t really had the chance to
show what he could contribute. You could tell he felt embarrassed and
ashamed’
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To pass the smell test
I felt really identified with this story because I've had to deal with this
issue multiple times in my life. I don't mean with my bo...
2 hours ago
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I haven't read it but I think I want to now.
My edition is only 94 pages long. So you can save it for a night of insomnia - perfect unsettling reading...
I read it and... well, I have to say that whilst I probably wouldn't have selected myself from shelves without your prompting you've hit a four out of four for worthwhile reads.
It's an incredibly disconcerting book. It's title couldn't be more apt in that respect: 'disquiet' indeed. Even the quote at the start is unnerving (Avec mon main brulee, j'ecris sur la nature du feu -- With my burnt hand I wrote about the nature of fire).
Another thing that struck me was the occasional interruption into the steady narrative of some rather unusual words. the language overall is often kept quite simple, even if loaded with meaning (ie "the woman"). But then you get sudden jarring words like 'craquelure', 'friand', 'vulva'refuseniks', 'penumbral'. I know none of these words are per se that obscure but they seemed to knock me out of my reading stride.
How did I feel about the horror story at its heart, the baby? Very uncomfortable, but it suited the sense of this incredibly disjointed family being drawn back to that house with all their awkward and difficult personal histories, poor choices and secret lives (though these all seem utterly unsuccessful attempts at 'living'). No wonder the baby descends into decay in and out of the freezer...
It's very cinematic, isn't it? As I read it through the first time, the images were crystal-clear. I could imagine an art-house film being made of this, full of atmospheric moodiness and slow fades.
So far, I've followed along with three of the four books offered by the Benign Dictatorship, and because they are short books, I've been able to re-read each one, sometimes as many as three times. I noticed a key difference with this one. With A Month in the Country and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I enjoyed the re-readings as much, if not even more, than the first. I didn't particularly enjoy re-reading Disquiet the second time, although it did clear up a couple of plot points for me. (I had missed the reason that Marcus hasn't phoned ahead to tell his mother what has happened at the hospital, for example. I got it the second time through.)
I'm wondering why this should be. Is it because of the clarity? I dunno. I think, though, that A Month in the Country and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie have the hallmarks of being modern classics. Perhaps Disquiet, as well-written as it is, does not.
Persephone: Odd, isn't it because Disquiet doesn't exactly have a mystery at its heart but there is something about it that works differently on a follow-up reading. I'd intially thought that there's a sense of irresolution about the ending in Disquiet that makes it different, but does that hold...?
Ali and Nino certainly had an ending; A Month in the Country had an ending of 'what might have been'; Miss Brodie ends with the girls and Brodie either dead or discomforted by the encounter with their teacher and her values.
Is the final demise of baby Alice enough of an ending in Disquiet to give us resolution to this disjointed family? I don't really know...
i really enjoyed this - don't normally gravitate towards very short books, for some reason, but if this had been any longer it would have lost alot of its impact, I think. I thought it was excellent - really well written, nicely mysterious and oblique. Will look forward to seeing what she does next.
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