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
Levy, author of the Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home, proves with this collection that her precision and unusual imagination are well suited to the short story form. The 10 spare stories included here explore the desire for a change in identity, in oneself and in others. In "Cave Girl," the narrator's sister undergoes what she refers to as a sex change, but instead of being surgically transformed into a man, she merely receives a cosmetic makeover to become "another kind of woman"-one who is more overtly feminine. In "Stardust Nation," one man appropriates another's memory of childhood trauma. Frequently, both personal and national identities are in play, as in "Vienna," where a man dubs his aloof lover "middle Europe," or when, in "Shining a Light," a British woman, separated from her luggage in Prague, is adopted by an amiable group of Serbian expats. In the particularly strong title story, an ad executive with a hunchback perceptively notes that his date, an archaeologist, is more interested in him as a specimen than as a lover. The closing story, "A Better Way to Live," offers a sense of hope after the downbeat preceding entries, as two people, both orphaned as children, find a new home with each other. Levy's talent is evident throughout-though the stories themselves can be unsettling, their evocative language invites the reader to settle in. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This collection of ten very short stories by Levy (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize for her story collection, Swimming Home) takes place in familiar European cities-London, Dublin, Vienna, Prague, and Barcelona-and features characters who are either deformed, displaced, or deranged. Deformed, as in the title story, "Black Vodka," in which a successful ad executive with a congenital hump on his back meets an attractive archaeologist who takes a more than scientific interest in him. Displaced, as in the story, "Shining a Light," in which a young woman traveling to Prague loses her luggage and is helped out by a group of Serbian refugees who have lost everything. Deranged, as in "Stardust Nation," another story about ad men, in which Nick, suffering a mental breakdown, assumes the identity of his boss and his boss's shocking, trauma-filled past. VERDICT Levy provides fragmentary glimpses into the fascinating lives of people at odds with their surroundings and profoundly disturbed by their previous experiences. Edgy, unsettling, and intoxicating.-Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont. (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.
