The Unloved

January 1, 2015
In a rented French chateau where a group of tourists of many nationalities have assembled for Christmas, there is feasting, clandestine sex, heroin and a death. But this is no conventional murder mystery.After the success of her most recent novel, Swimming Home (2012), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Levy's earlier novel-with its prefiguring aspects-is published for the first time in the U.S. It's a dark, uncomfortable story of desire and damage involving three couples (two with children) and two single women gathered together in bourgeois comfort in Normandy. The death of one member of the house party, subsequently investigated by a French police inspector, lends formal shape, but Levy's interest is less in plot, more in psychology. While the children play and the couples interact, the focus falls on Yasmina, an Algerian woman now lecturing in London, who has had encounters with the parents of another guest, Nancy, an American, decades earlier, when Algeria was struggling to gain independence from the French. Chapters revisiting that brutal era, exposing Yasmina's shocking story, are sandwiched between staccato scenes in contemporary France in which the subject of love is considered, uncomfortably and repeatedly: "To be in love is to be bitten"; "There is no love without rage." The tone of the narration is theatrical, as characters cook, comment, share beds, suffer, and sometimes deliver speeches or actual lines of dramatic dialogue. Levy's approach is cerebral and unsentimental, exploring, in prose both sensuous and supple, the sadness and perplexity of children, the unsatisfied desires of adults, and, above all, the power and role of love.Graphic, claustrophobic and fractured, this is emotionally violent and challenging work from a bold modern writer.

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December 1, 2014

References to characters either loved or unloved recur throughout this episodic and not always convincing novel from Levy, author of Swimming Home, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. It opens with a police inspector interviewing the guests at a chateau in the French Pyrenees. One of the guests may have been murdered, but this isn't a mystery. It is an intentionally chaotic, muddled, and introspective work with an international cast of characters. This reviewer needed a chart to keep track of them all; characters are sometimes named but too often referred to only by their nationality. In starts and stops, the novel reveals the events that led to the guest's suspicious death. Instead of a chronological or straightforward recounting of the facts, however, we get a series of conversations, interior monologs, snippets, and digressions told from various perspectives. This is part of the book's conceit but will leave many adrift. VERDICT Though the seemingly random events in the novel do come together after a second reading, most readers will find this a stream-of-consciousness mess. Recommended for those who like that genre and people willing to reread; book clubs may find this a challenging title, inspiring much debate.--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

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