Sometimes, we don’t search for a particular book to read. It just finds us. That happened to me with “Quietus”. One of the best books I’ve read this year.
I connected to Nick immediately, and the story was appealing, so it was a struggle to close the book. This is one of the books that you read in one breath. I could connect with all the characters, with Nick, with Carrie, even with Sophie. The description about them made me like them in a different way, all of them, yes, even Sophie.
All Nick ever wanted, was to be accepted – to fit into society, to be noticed by his parents, and to fall irrevocably in love.
One out of three wasn’t bad. And Sophie: beautiful; passionate; impulsive Sophie; said she loved him too … up until the day she killed herself.
Wracked by grief and desperate to abscond, he moves to Jersey where he meets Carrie in the woods that surround his new home. She challenges Nick to confront his nightmare, and in doing so, risk insanity as he is besieged with deeper, darker, more sinister revelations about the girl he thought he knew.
He can run away from his girlfriend’s suicide but can he ever escape Sophie? Or the fact that her death … was his fault?
The author describes not only the physical part, but also their thoughts and how their mind works, and before you even realize it, you have this strong bond with every single one of them. The personality of Sophie is so well described, that’s it’s almost unbelievable. All the sociopathic characteristics, the whole building of this character is so appealing to read, it makes you want to know what’s wrong and how it can be fixed, and it is told by Nick, by someone who has affection towards this person and it tells both sides of the story, how a person can make you like them and make you hate them at the same time. The scenes are so realistic, that I felt like I was there. Each chapter is left unfinished, and it only makes you want to read more and more.
The whole death-life thing made this book special to me. It made me think way deeper than just how the scenes are put. Maybe I didn’t get the point of the story… I just wonder now. It will bother me for days, that’s for sure. It will haunt me and make me think again and again, deeper and deeper about what was the character’s purpose in this book. Why they were exactly where they were, and why did Nick went to Jersey right after his death in the first place. All in all, this indeed was a story that has a deep meaning behind her, that reaches into people’s minds and hearts and certainly stays there for a while, like I’m certain it will stay in mine too.
It is a story that makes us realize things about life, and then ask ourselves if what we believed in up until now is really true. It made me think how sometimes dead people can influence us, like Carrie influenced Nick, and Nick influenced Sophie. It makes me think how, in fact, it isn’t the dead people that influence us, but just us ourselves. When you think about it deeper, you’ll realize we don’t change because someone is influencing, but we change because someone woke up some thoughts in us, and it’s us that realize it all and then change.
Did Sophie kill herself, or they were actually there, because the whole trip was their imagination. Did they influence her, or it was only Sophie herself? I guess I’ll never answer some of those questions, but I still do think sometimes it’s us ourselves that realize some things, even though Nick and Carrie’s deaths had a purpose too. If there wasn’t a Carrie, there wouldn’t be an imaginary trip to Sophie’s hospital. And if there wasn’t a Nick, we’d never realize that she’s a sociopath.
