by Deborah Levy
I had no regrets about not swimming back to the Big Silver, but I did regret not finding the white Egyptian cotton tablecloth on Christmas Day the year before. In the end I’d had to use a white paper tablecloth. It didn’t look that good, though I had suggested to my daughters that our table looked like the sort of French brasserie where the waiter writes our order on the corners of the paper cloth and then comes round later to add up the bill. They did not recall the sort of brasserie I had in mind and asked if I was going to charge our guests for Christmas lunch. This year the white Egyptian cotton cloth would be adorned with candles, red berries, holly and mistletoe. Their father would join us and I would invite the man who cried at the funeral and his new lover to join the table. And Celia, obviously, if she could fit me into her busy schedule. We decided to make cranberry as well as bread sauce, and swapped tips on how to make both. There was no way we could console each other for the undisclosed hurt that had contributed to sinking the boat, or for our lack of desire to swim back to it. Yet it was true that the societal mask of husband and wife, which we had worn for so long, had slipped, and we could see each other again. Perhaps what we saw was too human to bear. We stood up, put on our coats and kissed each other goodbye.
The night before, I had watched an interview on television with a middle-aged Mexican woman who worked as a dishwasher in a casino in Vegas. She had raised seven children, her son was serving in the Marines, she was speaking about fleeing to America when she was young. I was half listening and then I was completely listening. Her words opened a space, a wide-open space inside me. ‘I crossed the border alone, I came feeling the black and bluish darkness, the howling of the coyotes, the sound of the plants.’
When a woman has to find a new way of living and breaks from the societal story that has erased her name, she is expected to be viciously self-hating, crazed with suffering, tearful with remorse. These are the jewels reserved for her in the patriarchy’s crown, always there for the taking. There are plenty of tears, but it is better to walk through the black and bluish darkness than reach for those worthless jewels.
Marguerite Duras suggested in a reverie that came to her from the calm of her final house, a home she had made to please herself, that ‘writing comes like the wind’.
It’s naked, it’s made of ink, it’s the thing written, and it passes like nothing else passes in life, nothing more, except life itself.
The writing you are reading now is made from the cost of living and it is made with digital ink.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company and widely broadcast on the BBC. The author of highly praised novels, including Hot Milk and Swimming Home (both Man Booker Prize finalists), The Unloved, and Billy and Girl, the story collection Black Vodka, and the memoir Things I Don’t Want to Know, she lives in London. Levy is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Also Available from Deborah Levy
Black Vodka
The stories in Black Vodka, by acclaimed author Deborah Levy, are perfectly formed worlds unto themselves, written in elegant yet economical prose. She is a master of the short story, exploring loneliness and belonging; violence and tenderness; the ephemeral and the solid; the grotesque and the beautiful; love and infidelity; and fluid identities national, cultural, and personal. In “Shining a Light,” a woman’s lost luggage is juxtaposed with far more serious losses; a man’s empathy threatens to destroy him in “Stardust Nation”; “Cave Girl” features a girl who wants to be a different kind of woman and succeeds in a shocking way; and a deformed man seeks beauty amid his angst in the title story.
These are twenty-first-century lives dissected with razor-sharp humor and curiosity. Levy’s stories will send you tumbling into a rabbit hole, and you won’t be able to scramble out until long after you’ve turned the last page.
“These ominous, odd, erotic stories burrow deep into your brain.” —Financial Times
“One of the most exciting voices in contemporary British fiction … Sophisticated and astringent.” —The Times Literary Supplement
Also Available from Deborah Levy
Hot Milk
Man Booker Prize Finalist
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 fledgling adult life. She and her mother travel to the searing coast of southern Spain to see a famous consultant in the hope that he might cure her unpredictable limb paralysis. But Dr. Gómez has strange methods that seem to have little to do with physical medicine, and as Rose’s illness becomes increasingly baffling, Sofia discovers her own desires in this transient desert community.
Hot Milk is a profound exploration of the sting of sexuality, of unspoken female rage, of 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.
“Gorgeous … What makes the book so good is Ms. Levy’s great imagination, the poetry of her language, her way of finding the wonder in the everyday, of saying a lot with a little, of moving gracefully among pathos, danger and humor and of providing a character as interesting and surprising as Sofia. It’s a pleasure to be inside Sofia’s insightful, questioning mind.” —Sarah Lyall, The New York Times Book Review
“Against fertile seaside backdrops, Sofia, seeking a robust, global meaning for femininity and motherhood, becomes increasingly bold.” —The New Yorker
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Swimming Home
Man Booker Prize Finalist
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.
“Exquisite.” —The New Yorker
“Readers will have to resist the temptation to hurry up in order to find out what happens … Our reward is the enjoyable, if unsettling, experience of being pitched into the deep waters of Levy’s wry, accomplished novel.” —Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review
“Here is an excellent story, told with the subtlety and menacing tension of a veteran playwright.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Elegant … subtle … uncanny … The seductive pleasure of Levy’s prose stems from its layered brilliance … [Swimming Home is] witty right up until it’s unbearably sad.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
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The Early Novels
Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, The Unloved
Beautiful Mutants, Deborah Levy’s feverish allegory of a first novel, explores the anxieties that pervaded the 1980s: exile and emigration, broken dreams, crazed greed and the first seeds of the global financial crisis, self-destructive desires, and the disintegration of culture.
In Swallowing Geography, J.K., like her namesake Jack Kerouac, is always on the road, meeting friends and strangers, battling her raging mother, and taking in the world through her uniquely irreverent, ironic perspective. Levy blends fairytale with biting satire, pushing at the edges of reality and marveling at where the world collapses in on itself.
In The Unloved, an international group of hedonistic tourists gathers to celebrate the holidays in a remote French château. Then a woman is brutally murdered, and the subsequent inquiry into her death proves to be more of an investigation into the nature of identity, love, insatiable rage, and sadistic desire.
These early novels illumin
ate Deborah Levy’s development as a novelist, bringing into focus the emergence of her surreal imagination, crystalline prose, and astute, unparalleled insight into the human experience.
“[Levy] writes like a hyperkinetic angel.” —The Times
“Written during her transition from playwright to prose, Deborah Levy’s early works conjure fractured and fluid worlds that are wholly immersive.” —The Guardian
Also Available from Deborah Levy
Things I Don’t Want to Know
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.” Orwell identified four reasons he was driven to hammer at his typewriter—political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism, and aesthetic enthusiasm—and Levy’s newest work riffs on these same commitments from a female writer’s perspective.
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 theater-writing days touring Poland in the midst of Eastern Europe’s economic crisis, where she observed how a soldier tenderly kissed the women in his life good-bye.
Spanning continents (Africa and Europe) and decades (we meet the author at seven, fifteen, and fifty), Things I Don’t Want to Know brings the reader into a writer’s heart.
“A profound and vivid little volume that is less about the craft than the necessity of making literature.” —Los Angeles Times
“A lively, vivid account of how the most innocent details of a writer’s personal story can gain power in fiction.” —The New York Times Book Review
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First published in 2018 in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton
This edition published in the United States 2018
Copyright © Deborah Levy, 2018
The line here is taken from “April Rain Song” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes copyright © Langston Hughes, 1994, reproduced by kind permission of David Higham and Harold Ober Associates.
Deborah Levy has quoted from her essay on Fashion and Freedom, co-commissioned by Manchester Literary Festival 2016, Manchester Art Gallery, and 14–18 NOW.
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-63557-191-2; eBook: 978-1-63557-192-9
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