Review by New York Times Review
"ELLIPTICAL" IS AN ADJECTIVE often used to describe Deborah Levy's jagged, imagistic style. Her snapshots of relationships, most of them disintegrating, are blunt, rueful and deadpan. Her characters confess a Didionesque anomie toward life's limited possibilities. After the success of Levy's last novel, "Swimming Home," which was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize in 2012, much of her out-of-print backlist has now been re-issued in Britain, including a two-for-one volume called "Early Levy" and a book of stories, "Black Vodka," half of which was previously collected in 2003. Now available in America, "Black Vodka" offers an enticing if uneven introduction to her work - which, like the liquor an ad copywriter shills in the title story, "will appeal to those in need of stylish angst." The ad man happens to be a hunchback, and a luscious archaeologist proclaims herself fascinated by his hump. "I have always thought of myself as lost property," he confesses, "someone waiting to be claimed." He's thrilled to be invited into her bed - but the story ends before they get there. Levy leaves them kissing in the rain, in a cab. In this, as in so many of her stories, anticipation and regret overshadow immediate experience. Levy's characters are often torn between the excitement of creating a new identity and the frustration of knowing they're soddenly stuck with their same old selves. "Stardust Nation," one of the strongest stories here - and one of the few with a plot - follows a man with an odd psychiatric condition. He seems to be becoming his boss, co-opting his boss's troubled past, even his dreams. "Rather him than me, I must say," the boss admits. Many of the stories focus on travelers' moments of dislocation. In "Shining a Light," a woman named Alice arrives in Prague, but her suitcase doesn't, so she must wear the same blue dress throughout her getaway. As she socializes with some Serbian expats, "she feels lonely and out of the loop, whatever the loop is." Clandestine lovers meet in Barcelona, in Dublin: "Another airport. Another country. Another hotel." For an estranged couple confronting the end of their marriage in "Roma," "their hotel room is not a place that invites intimacy." Having the action of a story happen offstage, in the unsaid ellipses, is a time-honored modernist technique. Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" may be the granddaddy of the slice-of-life story, suggesting a couple's whole unraveling over a single scene of drinks at a train station. But more is at stake in the Hemingway story - that couple is headed, after all, toward an illegal abortion - and every detail is chosen for imagistic heft. While Levy's prose can be tantalizingly poetic ("Kissing you," one of her characters muses, "is like new paint and old pain"), some of the stories seem offhanded, too slight to feel complete or compelling. Similar scenes were more satisfying as fragmentary sections of "Swimming Home"; they gained power when anchored to a set of characters her readers were getting to know, whose fate they were invested in following. 'Writing made me feel wiser than I actually was. Wise and sad.' Indeed, as Levy confesses in "Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing," some parts of "Swimming Home" had their roots in such stray passages of observation, scribbled in her diary decades earlier on a train headed to Krakow. Rootless and unhappy like one of her characters, Levy finds herself carrying that old diary when she journeys to an isolated bed-and-breakfast in Majorca, run by a sullen proprietress with secrets. There she befriends a Chinese shopkeeper to whom she tells her life story, despite the language barrier. In Britain, the book was released with the subtitle "A Response to George Orwell's 1946 Essay 'Why I Write.'" Levy adopts Orwell's reasons for her own chapter titles, producing a rejoinder that is decidedly - and wittily - non-Orwellian. We're deluding ourselves if we claim to know why we write, Levy argues, why particular memories come to haunt us or why they show up in our work decades later, transmogrified. CERTAINLY LEVY'S BIOGRAPHY explains why she's drawn to stories of exile and disenfranchisement. She was born in South Africa during apartheid. While her father was being tortured as a political prisoner, she was shunted off to live with a godmother and attended a local convent school as the only Jewish student. When her father was finally freed, the family emigrated to Britain - but then her parents separated. "I can't fall apart because I've never fallen together," the teenage Levy writes, paraphrasing Andy Warhol, as she impersonates a serious author in suburban West Finchley: "Writing made me feel wiser than I actually was. Wise and sad." Levy references Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Marguerite Duras, among others, in her feminist riposte to Orwell. "Perhaps when Orwell described sheer egoism as a necessary quality for a writer, he was not thinking about the sheer egoism of a female writer. Even the most arrogant female writer has to work over time to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December." Although her feminist gloss on the pressures of marriage and motherhood is not exactly news, "Things I Don't Want to Know" is still a lively, vivid account of how the most innocent details of a writer's personal story can gain power in fiction, especially when delivered without self-pity - because, as Levy contends, "emotion . . . is better conveyed in a voice that is like ice." LISA ZEIDNER is the author of five novels, most recently "Love Bomb." She is a professor in the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Rutgers University-Camden.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 28, 2014]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Author of the Man Booker Prize shortlisted Swimming Home offers a slim, nuanced autobiography that addresses Orwell's timeless question of "Why I Write" from a woman's perspective. Levy begins with a trip to Majorca on which she mysteriously packs one of her old notebooks, labeled "POLAND 1988", not knowing why she has brought it with her. The incident prompts Levy to recall how she used Polish menus from the notebook in her acclaimed novel, "in which the cabin crew on LOT airlines had morphed into nurses from Odessa." The memoir's project becomes evident in Levy's precise methods of showing how unrelated incidents from her life and experience become fodder, through the subconscious mind's unknowable alchemy, for her fiction. The precise, visceral scenes soon give way to a more philosophical tone as Levy sets about to deconstruct and analyze what it means to be a woman writer, quoting such luminaries as Adrienne Rich and Marguerite Duras. Her South African childhood, her father's abduction, and the family's later expatriation to England form the remainder of the slender memoir's narrative, and she continues to link lived experience to her development and process as a writer. Particularly fond of greasy spoon restaurants in England, she begins to write as a teenager inside their "steamed up windows and haze of cigarette smoke," a "sense of urgency accelerated." At these junctures, in which Levy explores the consciousness and central questions of a writer ("I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me"), this dreamlike book of ideas and memories displays its greatest strengths. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In her feminist answer to George Orwell's 1946 essay "Why I Write," Levy (Swimming Home; Beautiful Mutants; The Unloved) muses on her life experiences, using as her chapter headings Orwell's four motivations for writing: Political Purpose, Historical Impulse, Sheer Egoism, and Aesthetic Enthusiasm. As a child living in South Africa, she felt the sting of apartheid's cruelty at an early age. Not only did Levy see the "White Only" signs everywhere, but she watched her father's arrest for being an African National Congress member. The family's move to London when she was nine left her feeling displaced and sad, especially after her parents separated. As a teen she decided to be a writer, hanging out in the local greasy diner, dressed in a black straw hat and green platform shoes. Later, at age 50, while in Mallorca, she reflects on the expectations society places on women. VERDICT Levy successfully weaves historical, political, and personal threads together to form a nuanced account of her life and why she writes. Her graceful memoir/essay emphasizes a woman's need to speak out even if she has to use a quiet voice. For feminists and memoir enthusiasts.-Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A slim, elliptical memoir from novelist, poet and playwright Levy.Only in the most expansive terms can this be considered a book "on writing," as it is subtitled, though it could be considered a portrait of the writer as a young girl. Most of it at least, for the framing is plainly the author's adulthood, before the publication of her well-received novel Swimming Home (2011). It begins: "That spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn't see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations." Levy provides no context for her existential crisis, but she recounts her geographical cure to Majorca, where she shared a restaurant table with a Chinese man, who asked her where she was born. She writes, "I'm not sure I went on to say everything you're going to read now." Levy was born in apartheid South Africa, living in Johannesburg, when her father was imprisoned for being a member of the African National Congress. The author then lived with her godmother, where she didn't quite fit with the family and, perhaps symbolically, freed a bird from its cage (as she'd desired to do for her caged father). Eventually, her father was freed, and the family exiled itself to England, where Levy wondered, "How was I ever going to escape from living in exile? I wanted to be in exile from exile." Her full-circle return to the Majorca of the book's beginning brings a perspective informed by politics, feminism, and the challenge and redemption of writing: "What do we do with knowledge that we cannot bear to live with? What do we do with the things we do not want to know?"Readers get only a vague sense of what these things we don't want to know might be in a book that seems like a catharsis for the writer but might prove enigmatic for most readers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
