He is a renowned Swedish filmmaker and has a plan for everything. She is his daughter, by the actress he directed and once loved. Each summer of her childhood, the daughter visits the father at his remote Faro island home on the edge of the Baltic Sea.
Now that she's grown up - a writer, with children of her own - and he's in his eighties, they envision writing a book together, about old age, language, memory and loss. She will ask the questions. He will answer them. The tape recorder will record.
But it's winter now and old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen. And when the father is gone, only memories, images and words - both remembered and recorded - remain. And from these the daughter begins to write her own story, in the pages which become this book.
Heart-breaking and spell-binding, Unquiet is a seamless blend of fiction and memoir in pursuit of elemental truths about how we live, love, lose and age.
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TO SEE, TO REMEMBER, TO COMPREHEND. 1, HAMMARS PRELUDE
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(@PenguinUKBooks, 3 September 2020, 388 pages, paperback, #ARC from the publisher and voluntarily reviewed)
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I really wanted to read this book when the publisher emailed me to see if I was interested in an ARC and I read the blurb and praise heaped on the book. It sounded like something I'd really enjoy. I loved it. The quality of the paperback is very high. It's a gorgeous book. I love the cover and the feel of it. The style of the writing reminds me a lot of Joyce Carol Oates. The author uses a non-linear narrative to gradually weave the tale of father and daughter and the bonds between them. The book focuses on the father becoming ill, his death, the funeral and aftermath, the months leading to his death when father and daughter started to write his memoir together as well as delving into the father's colourful life, his children with different women, his love affairs and his glowing career. There are no markers to help root you in the past or present or a specific date or time and you just need to go with the flow of the beautiful prose. Only now I've finished it do I realise the book uses a sort of stream-of-consciousness style. Unquiet is a gorgeous book, beautifully written, intense and dazzling. I really loved it.
