OK, I'm clearly in the minority, as most people HATED this! But take equal parts Lawrence Durrell, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Agatha Christie - puree on high, and the resulting cocktail is 'The Unloved'... while at the same time remaining 100% Levy. It IS a difficult book to follow, but the key for me was keeping a character list I could refer back to and add on as the book progressed. It doesn't help that Levy almost arbitrarily and alternately refers to her characters by either their names or cou...

I actually feel drained...and it all lead to nowhereville.... how sad. and the pages blurred and they killed a white rat that was really a princesses unicorn, but the clock didn't strike midnight and the queen wore her glitter hairnet to the fish market whilst the mexican boy traveled the world only to wake and find out he hadn't really traveled anywhere but he was sleeping with the princess wearing her black ballet shoes. Makes sense? good!

I read Hot Milk and it blew me away and thought Levy was one of the most interesting contemporary writers I had ever read – then I read Swimming Home which made me a massive fan of hers and I started buying it for friends. So this book confuses me, I eagerly read it (and marked it highly) but it made such little impact on me that I just can’t remember anything about, indeed I actually forget I have read this so little did it imprint itself on me. I find this utterly perplexing. I can’t even ‘rev...

Hypnotically depressing. The prose wavers between cerebral and poetic.

"I have been damaged by unlove. It makes me weep at inappropriate moments when I should be dignified. It makes my voice strange and narrows my eyes. My loud laugh has become sly. If I had been loved, I might have had more charm. I might not have been ugly and apologetic. As it is I have only guile." A group of Europeans and Americans gather to celebrate the holiday season in a French chateau. While there, one of the women is murdered. As the story unfolds, we are transported back to 1950 Algiers...

An early Levy novel that offers a fascinating insight into the development that reached fruition with Swimming Home and Hot Milk. Like Swimming Home much of this book takes place in a holiday house with a rather odd collection of guests - this time a chateau in Normandy. Each of the characters represents a nation, and Levy deliberately confuses things by switching between their names and nationalities. The middle part is set in Algeria in the late 50s. The atmosphere is creepy and dreamlike, ful...

couldn't quite stay up enough to finish this one, which tells me a bit about my not-quite-love of the story... Levy has a overwhelming style, she comes at you from so many directions and angles with her phrases and adjectives and verbs and imagery from somewhere else... her characters are full to the brim with life and feelings and purpose... this novel(la?) was on some tangent of sorts from her other books - Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography - more of a narrative or plot or something l...

The stream of conscious narrative style, and the way in which the novel jumped back and forth through time did at times make the story a bit hard to follow. It is certainly the sort of book one needs to read carefully to pick up on all the details and subtleties, but that being said I found it to be a highly gripping read. A group of tourists from various different countries are gathered together on vacation in a French Chateau. They are a collection of cynical, apathetic, self-serving individua...

The two previous DL books I sampled were triumphs, most notably the dark comedy Billy & Girl. This one was closer to Ophelia & the Great Idea in style, but given scope to roam outside the short form, this style becomes an overblown flan of staggering pretention.The book opens in a French chateau with a vague drawing-room murder setup. We’re then introduced to a range of characters worse than Big Brother contestants for sheer violent weirdo backward madness. These are the Unloved of the title: re...

The Unloved is an unsettling novel, primarily because at its core, it concerns Western violence inflicted upon Algeria in its struggle for independence which began almost as soon as WWII ended. But it is also unsettling because it begins as a comedy of manners amongst rich tourists who come to a chateau in Normandy to spend the Christmas holidays. That something is going on is apparent from the beginning because there is a dead body and an 11-year old girl says she knows who did it. But nothing

"The unloved look heavier than the loved. Their eyes are sadder but their thoughts are clearer." Deborah Levy has such a unique voice, she pulled me right in to this chateau and all the messy, self-centered tourists' lives. We know there was a murder, and the story dances around that, but at its core this is a story of violence -- the violence in Algiers, in WWII, murder, and the smaller violences inflicted upon one another.

There are fictions, technologies, geographies, and there is poetry. There is coherence, incoherence and exhilaration. There is attraction and playing it cool and there is attraction and abandon. There is love and there is ambivalence, but there is mostly ambivalence. And there is freedom. What do you do with freedom?There are certainly fictions, technologies, geographies and poetry in this amazing book. It can be difficult to keep track of the story and the characters. I made a list of the chara...

Clunky, odd and utterly unengaging. SUCH a beautiful cover it's a shame to abandon it ...

An unpleasant story about unpleasant people in an unpleasant place. Now, I'm okay with that--reading only books about pleasant people is silly and stupidly limiting-- but I need a payoff, something that makes spending so much time with unpleasant people in their unpleasant story seem worth it. There's some lovely writing here, and a few good moments, but not enough to make reading the book seem worthwhile. I was glad to be done with it, and that's never a good sign.

Deborah Levy‘s early novel “The Unloved” was odd and felt disconnected. I didn’t really understand what was going on and therefore didn’t enjoy reading it very much – 1 star.My full review is available on my blog: https://whatrebeccasread.wordpress.co...

Probably need to read it again. Of the three parts I liked the middle best. Yasmina the Algerian is the character that interested me the most. The scenes between the Italian woman and the police inspector were also well written. It's not as good as Swimming Home but then what is? Definitely worth a second read.

this book was "unloved" by me

Due to the success of Swimming Home getting a Man Booker shortlisting in 2012, Deborah Levy’s 1995 novel The Unloved was edited and republished earlier this year. I have been a fan of Levy since discovering Swimming Home thanks to the Man Booker and I admit I was a little slack getting to her backlist. I read her collection of short stories last year and finally returned to another novel with The Unloved.The Unloved tells the story of a group of self-indulgent European tourists who decide to cel...

Maybe I missed something and the meaning of the story went right over my head, but I'm just left confused.

Here is a vivid and incisive narrative very nearly sunk by plot contrivances.The bare bones of it are not promising: upper-class protagonists filled with secret anxieties gather in a vacation home in Brittany. Then, a dead body turns up, eliciting remarkable little uproar from the assembled house guests.Where Levy succeeds, as in all of her works, is in her precise control of language, her economical scene-setting, and her attention to both the micro- and macro- scales. It's a little book with r...