Deborah Levy's Top 3 Books

In the last dates, Deborah Levi moves between the narrative and the biographical (Something evident with his latest work «autobiography under construction» divided into several works). A literary exercise as a placebo for the wounds of time, life's rudeness and natural forced resignations. But curiously, it is in that phase of adulthood in which casualties begin to be counted that the most glorious pages are achieved.

The precise balance between melancholy and desire, between hope and disenchantment marks new routes and explores paths that only in that middle path of life, as Dante would say, can one enter for the greater enjoyment of readers in general.

But before taking herself as the protagonist of her books (as, curiously, other authors tend to do more than authors. Gabriela wiener with that capacity for the most stark sincerity from the inside), Deborah Levy also told us other stories where the focus on the outside immediately demonstrated that strange gift of good storytellers.

I am referring to the ability to capture the anomaly, the strangeness, the most significant tic in a character that goes from the anecdotal to the transcendental, from the detail to the complete physiognomy. The point is to narrate about what is different to end up demonstrating, through empathy, that there is no uniformity or normality under which to disguise oneself...

Deborah Levi's Top 3 Recommended Novels

Hot milk

Sofía's particular life story is woven into that strange limbo created between a suffocating motherhood and a hidden need for autonomy. Because at twenty-five years of age, Sofia is very young, too young to dedicate herself to the care of her mother Rose.

Her mother's ailment is indeterminate enough to consider that it might not be such, or that it might not be so bad ... An illness that binds her to her daughter until the end of her days, like a conviction for the debt of the previous breeding. Because the father has not been around for a long time, and although Sofía considers looking for him during this story, the shadow that the blanket will always be of little use, with a certain hint of despair.

The point is that together, mother and daughter, they travel from England to Almería, where they hope to find some kind of cure in a reference clinic for patients evicted by traditional medicine.

Almería stretches out like a complete desert, like the life of Sofía herself, an anthropologist with a degree but unable to find a job and a life. But Almeria also has its beach, overlooking the Alboran Sea, where so many adventurers once traveled in search of new worlds.

And on those inspiring beaches, Sofía takes advantage of her free time to spread what remains of her soul. Until he meets Ingrid, a German resident, and also a lifeguard willing to help shipwrecks of all kinds.

Undoubtedly, the new characters entering Sofia's life avoid their own total shipwreck, or at least appear as rescuers for her most intimate plot. Defeat is less so when Sofía indulges in the strangest sex, as revenge for all her time spent under the burden of maternal illness and the tutelage of her domains with the rancid aroma of a matriarchal empire.

But of course, the contrast can always create internal conflicts and the couple disturbance of us as readers and discoverers of the imbalance that ends up turning Sofía's vital balance.

The metaphor of the hot waters where jellyfish abound in search of tremulous and hot meat to cling to ... improvised sex as a form of struggle against the impossibility of youth and life. The Almeria sun, at times generator of lights and shadows, overexposed images, but always intense ...

The man who saw it all

Wisdom, in a high percentage of occasions, resides in ignorance. To know everything is to condemn oneself to discover the unfathomable abysses of the human will. As well as the sinister coincidences that weave destiny.

In 1988, in London, young Saul Adler is hit by a Jaguar while crossing the famous Abbey Road pedestrian crossing. Without any apparent injury, the next day he leaves for East Berlin on a scholarship as a historian. But the injuries caused by the accident seem more serious than he thought, and during his stay in Germany he begins to have visions of the future, such as the fall of the Berlin wall.

In 2016, years after returning to London and in the midst of Brexit, Saul is hit again on Abbey Road by the same car. From that moment on, he will depend on someone else's story to make sense of his memories, condensed into a complex mosaic of people he has hurt and obsessive details in which the past and the present are interwoven in an endless circle. exit.

The Man Who Saw It All is a profound reflection on the way history repeats itself when we don't fix our mistakes. Deborah Levy traces a disturbing journey through Europe in recent decades, showing us that memory can be shaped in the same way as borders.

Swimming home

Swimming home the fish do. Some with more effort than others, like salmon going upstream to spawn, how can only be done in the warm bed of the home. But yes, humans also sometimes have to swim towards that home that increasingly catches upstream ...

As soon as he arrives with his family at a house in the hills overlooking Nice, Joe discovers the body of a girl in the pool. But Kitty Finch is alive, she comes out of the water naked with her nails painted green and presents herself as a botanist… What is she doing there? What do you want from them? And why does Joe's wife allow him to stay?

Swimming Home is a subversive and fast-paced book, a relentless look at the insidious effect of depression on seemingly stable and distinguished people. With a very tight structure, the story unfolds in a summer house over a week in which a group of attractive and imperfect tourists on the Riviera are pushed to the limit. With scathing humor, the novel grabs the reader's attention immediately, bearing its dark side lightly.

Other recommended books by Deborah Levy…

A home of your own

Yes, Deborah Levy herself was the salmon in search of that house that she has struggled to find after a highly recommended trilogy to discover the best routes of untimely travel. Because life starts once and can be restarted in countless ways. This biography under construction by Deborah Levy teaches us to change course with each new blog, always escaping from the expected North ...

Deborah Levy imagines a house in a warm latitude, near a lake or sea. There is a fireplace there and a butler who attends to your wishes, even arguing. But Levy is actually in London, he has no money to build the home he imagines, his apartment is tiny and the closest thing to a garden in his house is a banana to which he gives the care his daughters no longer need. The youngest has left the nest, and Levy, at fifty-nine, is ready to face a new stage in her life. Thus, he takes us from New York to Bombay, passing through Paris and Berlin, while weaving a stimulating and daring reflection on the meaning of home and the specters that haunt it.

Interweaving the past and the present, the personal and the political, and summoning Marguerite Duras, Elena Ferrante, Georgia O'Keeffe and Céline Schiamma, the author investigates the meaning of femininity and property. Through her memories she takes inventory of her real and imaginary possessions and questions our way of understanding the value of a woman's intellectual and everyday life.

From Things I don't want to know y The cost of living This work is the culmination of an autobiography written in the heat of a life that is not only carried out by Levy, but by all the women who support it with an invisible net.

Things I don't want to know

There are no secrets more disturbing than those that one can tell oneself. An autobiography written to be read by the author himself or herself is the most overwhelming exercise in sincerity; the walk of the tightrope walker without a net over the present, past and future. and Deborah Levy points to nudity of the soul in installments. Here begins «Autobiography in progress».

Deborah Levy starts these memories remembering the stage of her life when she burst into tears when she went up an escalator. That innocuous movement took her to corners of her memory that she didn't want to return to. It is those memories that form Stuff not I want know, the beginning of his «autobiography under construction».

This first part of what will be a triptych on the condition of being a woman was born as a response to the essay “Why I write”, by George Orwell. However, Levy does not come to give answers. He comes to open questions that he leaves floating in an atmosphere formed by all the poetic force of his writing.

Her magic is none other than that of the unpredictable connections of memory: the first bite of an apricot takes her to the exit of her children from school, observing the other mothers, "young women turned into shadows of what they had been" ; a woman's cry brings back the snow falling on her father in apartheid Johannesburg, shortly before he was imprisoned; the smell of curry takes her back to her teenage years in London, writing on pub napkins and dreaming of a room of her own. Reading Levy is wanting to enter his memories and letting himself be carried away by the calm and poise of someone who has learned everything he knows (and everything he doesn't want to know) by dint of searching for his own voice.

the cost of living

Deborah Levy begins writing this book when, at the age of fifty, she is forced to reinvent herself: her marriage is over, her income is declining, her mother is dying, and her daughters are starting to leave the nest. At a time when life should become placid and unflappable, Levy decides to embrace chaos and instability in exchange for recovering, hidden under layers and layers of resignation, a proper name.

Through a dialogue with intellectuals such as Marguerite Duras or Simone de Beauvoir, and through memories that he evokes with eloquence, sensitivity and a delicious sense of humor, Levy asks what is this fictional role written by men and played by women that we call « femininity". Anyone who has struggled to be free and to build a life of their own knows that it is precisely that: a constant struggle in which a cost is paid for living.

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