Writers Who Inspire Us: The Astute Cultural Commentary of Deborah Levy
Image from LitHub
“The writing most likely to survive the age of the screen will be esoteric thought – streams exploring the death wish, desire, disappointment and despair. It will be the new commercial fiction.” - Deborah Levy
My first introduction to Deborah Levy came in the form of her novel Hot Milk (2016). Sitting front and centre on the ‘Hot Picks’ shelf at my local library, I skimmed the blurb, decided it might be an easy beach read and popped it through the library scanner along with a few other books.
I never expected a book that would tug me right back to my early twenty-something years, the intense feeling of escapement and yearning European travels drew out in me, the searing analysis of mother-daughter dynamics and burgeoning female awakening that the pages contained.
Hot Milk introduces us to Sofia, on a trip to Spain with her mother - a demanding woman, they are seeking medical assistance for the seemingly unexplainable physical ailments that plague her. The trip initiates a fracture within Sofia’s life, which has so far been on hold due to attending only to her mother’s demands. Sofia’s sense of identity has become intensely wrapped up in her mother’s taking on her pain and conditions psychosomatically - when her mother limps, Sofia limps too.
Much of the book focuses on exploring the theme of identity, and despite it being a relatively short book, it is rich with meaning and emotion the sometimes simple prose belies.
From there, I was hooked. I immediately went in search of Levy’s earlier works, wanting to explore the trajectory of an author who had so quickly and wholly encaptured my own lived experiences, alongside the grander themes I find myself coming back to in life, with her writing.
I found a copy of Beautiful Mutants (1989) and Swallowing Geography second-hand, and while these short novella-style stories are wildly different from Hot Milk, they have a superbly enticing appeal. These stories were written when Levy was first transitioning from playwriting to fiction writing, and they demonstrate a fractured fluidity that is difficult to sink into at first (especially after the lucidity of Hot Milk), but they’re brilliant none-the-less.
Beautiful Mutants' focuses on a mysterious Russian exile, Lapinski, described by her neighbour as "a shameless cunt ... Don't ever expect a simple answer to a simple question from Lapinski. She doesn't know how to talk straight." Lapinski collects stories from a series of intriguingly named characters: The Poet, The Anorexic Anarchist, The Banker. It’s a fairytale-infused piece of fiction that demands your attention when reading, with the characters speaking in riddles amongst an incredibly vivid backdrop of a world Levy spins around them.
Both Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography are designed to be provocative, even somewhat antagonistic, commentary of the political gaps arising across Europe at the time of writing.
I have since moved away from her fiction to pursue some of her essay/memoir works which, as anticipated, have proven illuminatory and enlightening to read.
The two I have read so far - Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013) and The Cost of Living (2018), Levy describes as ‘living autobiographies’. When asked about the concept in an interview with The Guardian, Levy replied:
“I’m writing three living autobiographies: Things I Don’t Want to Know is my 40s; The Cost of Living my 50s; my third one will be my 60s – I’m not there yet, so I don’t know what’s going to be in that one. Those decades – the 40s, 50s and 60s – were undocumented years in terms of female experience. I thought it would be exciting to see what they were about and what they reveal. It seemed to me that autobiographies are usually written in retrospect, right at the end of one’s life: what would it be like to write one while you were living?”
Levy has ascertained that she is interested in the ways we tell our personal histories, the propensity to ensure we tell them from a favourable perspective, ensuring we leave out the parts that fail to serve us. In writing a ‘living autobiography’, Levy is already entangled with the experience as she writes it. There’s less of an ability to reflect and remove, and both of these books capture the essence of happiness versus unhappiness that exist across a life. As levy says “we don’t want to privilege one experience over the other”, and she doesn’t in her work.
In Things I Don't Want to Know, a response to George Orwell’s essay ‘Why I Write’, Levy details the frictions she has experienced in releasing her writing out into the world in her essential vivid way:
"I did not know how to get the work, my writing, into the world. I did not know how to open the window like an orange. If anything, the window had closed like an axe on my tongue. If this was to be my reality, I did not know what to do with it."
As a writer, it was this and similar insights Levy details in both of her ‘living memoirs’ so far that have spoken to me the most. This idea of figuring out what to do with your ‘tongue’, the differentiation between speaking and writing and getting it out, as best you can, in the way you feel you need to. It’s a fundamental problem that many writers grapple with and in all of Levy’s works I’ve read to date, one she has diligently been providing some answers to.
Image by @lady__literati
Recommended Reading
Fiction
Swimming Home (2012) - The Man Booker Prize, Best Novel Nominee
As he arrives with his family at the villa in the hills above Nice, Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe's enigmatic wife allow her to remain? A subversively brilliant study of love, Swimming Home reveals how the most devastating secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves.
Hot Milk (2016) - Goldsmiths Prize, Best Book Nominee & Man Booker Prize, Best Novel Nominee
Sofia, a young anthropologist, has spent much of her life trying to solve the mystery of her mother's unexplainable illness. She is frustrated with Rose and her constant complaints, but utterly relieved to be called to abandon her own disappointing fledgeling adult life. She and her mother travel to the searing, arid coast of southern Spain to see a famous consultant--their very last chance--in the hope that he might cure her unpredictable limb paralysis. Hot Milk is a profound exploration of the sting of sexuality, of unspoken female rage, myth and modernity, the lure of hypochondria and big pharma, and, above all, the value of experimenting with life; of being curious, bewildered, and vitally alive to the world.
The Man Who Saw Everything (2019) - The Man Booker Prize, Best Novel Nominee
Saul Adler, a narcissistic young historian, has been invited to Communist East Berlin to do research; in exchange, he must publish a favourable essay about the German Democratic Republic. As a gift for his translator’s sister, a Beatles fanatic who will be his host, Saul’s girlfriend will shoot a photograph of him standing in the crosswalk on Abbey Road, a homage to the famous album cover. As he waits for her to arrive, he is grazed by an oncoming car, which changes the trajectory of his life. The Man Who Saw Everything is about the difficulty of seeing ourselves and others. Levy traverses the vast reaches of the human imagination while artfully blurring sexual and political binaries―feminine and masculine, East and West, past and present--to reveal the full spectrum of our world.
Non-Fiction
Things I Don’t Want to Know: On Writing (2013)
Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory into a luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss, Things I Don't Want to Know is Deborah Levy's witty response to George Orwell's influential essay "Why I Write." As she struggles to balance womanhood, motherhood, and her writing career, Levy identifies some of the real-life experiences that have shaped her novels, including her family's emigration from South Africa in the era of apartheid; her teenage years in the UK where she played at being a writer in the company of builders and bus drivers in cheap diners; and her theatre-writing days touring Poland amid Eastern Europe's economic crisis, where she observed how a soldier tenderly kissed the women in his life goodbye.
The Cost of Everything (2018)
This vibrant memoir, a portrait of contemporary womanhood in flux, is an urgent quest to find an unwritten central female character who can exist more easily in the world. Levy considers what it means to live with meaning, value, and pleasure, to seize the ultimate freedom of writing our own lives, and reflects on the work of such artists and thinkers as Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Elena Ferrante, Marguerite Duras, David Lynch, and Emily Dickinson. The Cost of Living, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal in Nonfiction, is crucial testimony, as distinctive, witty, complex, and original as Levy’s acclaimed novels.
Real Estate (2020)
From one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, comes the highly anticipated final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography'. Following the international critical acclaim of The Cost of Living, this final volume of Deborah Levy's 'Living Autobiography' is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it.
About Elaine Mead
Elaine is a freelance writer and editor from London, currently residing in Tasmania. She is passionately interested in the ways in which we can learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves, and believes in the power of words to connect. She's also obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her on Instagram @cestelaine
