Playing Her Own Music
Deborah Levy, August Blue
Hamish Hamilton, 256pp, £14.99, ISBN 978-0241421314
reviewed by Lucy Thynne
A woman is wandering around an Athens flea market. Blue-haired, 34 years old, and feeling untethered, Elsa Anderson is an orphaned piano prodigy. She has just walked off stage midway through a performance in Vienna, where she switched from playing a Rachmaninov concerto to playing a composition of her own. From the outside, her identity crisis looks fairly under control — she’s teaching piano, hopping between various European cities, ignoring the calls of her austere piano teacher-slash-adoptive father, Arthur. Right now, she’s busy watching a transaction at a nearby stall: a stranger buying two mechanical horses. Both of them have the same coat. When the stranger turns round, she sees that they also have the same face.
Levy’s ingredients are in the mix. The problem is set: how is it possible that Elsa and the stranger are the same person, that ‘she was me and I was her’? Like her doppelganger, Elsa also covets the mechanical horses. For now, she settles on stealing her double’s hat. The rest is folded in more slowly, as each chases the other — across London, Paris, Sardinia. There are lateral flow tests and video calls with friends, because this is a pandemic world, one that oscillates between the dramatic pause of lockdowns and the fuzzy boundaries of emerging from them. Each time Elsa and her double spot each other, Levy returns to her point of enquiry. What is a self? And how would you speak to it, if you saw it walk by in front of you?
Identity — its slipperiness and contradictions — is Levy’s forte. In her novels, it is female identity that is at its slipperiest and most interesting: we are shown women at junctions in their lives, tasked with the tricky business of finding their places in the world. In Swimming Home, Levy’s breakout novel, a young Kitty Finch becomes so obsessed with an older male poet that she interrupts his family holiday on the French Riviera. In Hot Milk, Levy’s narrator Sofia swings painfully between a new love affair and adopting her mother’s hypochondria. Her women are ‘neither “feisty” nor “gutsy” — those tiresome cliches . . . they are both real and offer an example of how to live well,’ the critic Charlotte Higgins has recently written. They fail and yet continue to desire; ‘they have both good days and bad.’
Swimming Home and Hot Milk won Booker nominations. That was in 2012 and 2016. But it is her most recent books, the trio of living autobiographies (Things I Don’t Want To Know, The Cost of Living, and Real Estate) — the ‘60-year-old female character’, Levy herself — that have brought her a truly cult following. The memoirs are slim, yet expansive in scope: Levy’s childhood in apartheid-torn South Africa, her failing marriage, and pursuit to find a room of one’s own are just some of the topics covered. They are great because they draw extract pithy wisdom from a time of being both ‘happy and extremely miserable.’ They are the books I reach for most often, talismanic, when I am in a slump, forgetting how to live.
Elsa Anderson slots into that Levy-verse well. Like the narrator of Levy’s memoirs, her voice comes to us in pared-back, often witty, prose. And like all of Levy’s characters, her experiences are charged with a particular kind of intensity. Every sense is heightened, every object significant. In a sun-drenched Greece, Elsa dives for sea urchins, then later devours their ‘slimy, salty insides.’ She uses ‘orange blossom hand cream’ and drinks mint liqueur in the Parisian rain. Shoes are one of Levy’s many motifs, and they are there in Elsa’s ‘high snakeskin heels’ early on. I underline it, smiling at having found them. Picture here the younger Levy in gold platform wedges, cantering off to her first job interview at the Notting Hill Gate cinema. She would begin wearing shoes that ‘tapped to the beat of rebellion.’ In August Blue, Elsa finds similar self-creation in glamour. Almond biscuits and belted trench coats become paperweights for an identity floating away.
It’s fun trying to spot all of Levy’s symbols, but I won’t spend forever working out what they mean. It’s better waiting to see where the plot-line takes me: now, diverging to the question of Elsa’s biological parents. Is this a necessary puzzle piece in Elsa’s identity quest? Her teacher, Arthur Goldstein, thinks so. He summons her to Sardinia where he’s dying. There, he insists that she reads her own adoption papers. Though the mystery of the double has so far driven the tension of August Blue, here, it converges with the mystery of Elsa’s past. The mechanical horses have already triggered a long-buried memory of her mother, a presence of ‘someone unknown, but who was nevertheless listening very attentively.’ Could this be who is really following Elsa? She wonders if the memory of her mother is ‘something I had seen, or [that I] perhaps summoned to comfort or torment myself.’ Memory is fickle at the best of times, but it’s even fickler here in amongst a mental breakdown.
There are more candidates for the double when we start looking for them. Clues already lie planted, seed-like, in Real Estate. The older narrator muses to her younger self that ‘you never know what a woman really wants because she’s always being told what she wants.’ What if a double could act out ‘what a woman really wants’? What she is too cowardly, too embarrassed, or too humble to want? Here, I get excited. Levy is pushing at something genius: that nebulous, sprawling thing, the homage to the life you have not lived. Or that is living you, somewhere else, all the time. ‘Everyone knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the thing that do,’ says the narrator in Claire Louise-Bennett’s Pond. I sit up. I have been reading August Blue on a bed facing a mirror, and seeing my own double, flinch.
Playing her own music instead of Rachmaninov’s. Avoiding her dying adoptive father, then caving. Elsa, like the narrator of Real Estate, is a woman working out what she ‘really wants’, and her desires and actions are running in haywired disarray. If Levy has been poking at this problem for some time (‘what would it be like to meet our identical human double buying a pint of milk on a Sunday morning?’ her narrator asks in Real Estate), it is possible that in August Blue she confronts it. The narrator of Real Estate is laughed at by a panel of film executives for proposing a female character who ‘follows all her desires.’ It strikes me that in August Blue, Levy has written that character, if only through the device of the double.
If I’m making August Blue sound challenging, it is. But that’s not forget that much of the book takes place in the fun of drinks and dinners with friends, enjoying the sunshine of the European locations Levy does so well. The novel’s main skill is that it is agile, bending between its witticisms and deep intellectual thought. On one page, we are presented with Elsa’s identity complex via a Freudian cigar, dropped in her drink (who did it: Elsa or her double?) And on the next, we return to the light: Elsa, missing her takeaway coffees in lockdown, wonders whether her ‘identity is so fragile it depends on a flat white to keep it together.’ It’s this dance between the two that makes August Blue most exciting, most reminiscent of Levy’s memoirs.
Sometimes, I think Levy only gets away with it because she is Deborah Levy. Images can occasionally feel tenuous: a difficult door is described as though it had ‘fathomless depths and the key were having sex with it.’ When the lockdowns end, Elsa declares that ‘we were striding out into the world once more to infect and be infected by each other.’ But these are perhaps lazy sentences in a host of thoughtful, intentional ones. Finishing August Blue, I decide that Levy can get away with whatever she wants.
Levy’s ingredients are in the mix. The problem is set: how is it possible that Elsa and the stranger are the same person, that ‘she was me and I was her’? Like her doppelganger, Elsa also covets the mechanical horses. For now, she settles on stealing her double’s hat. The rest is folded in more slowly, as each chases the other — across London, Paris, Sardinia. There are lateral flow tests and video calls with friends, because this is a pandemic world, one that oscillates between the dramatic pause of lockdowns and the fuzzy boundaries of emerging from them. Each time Elsa and her double spot each other, Levy returns to her point of enquiry. What is a self? And how would you speak to it, if you saw it walk by in front of you?
Identity — its slipperiness and contradictions — is Levy’s forte. In her novels, it is female identity that is at its slipperiest and most interesting: we are shown women at junctions in their lives, tasked with the tricky business of finding their places in the world. In Swimming Home, Levy’s breakout novel, a young Kitty Finch becomes so obsessed with an older male poet that she interrupts his family holiday on the French Riviera. In Hot Milk, Levy’s narrator Sofia swings painfully between a new love affair and adopting her mother’s hypochondria. Her women are ‘neither “feisty” nor “gutsy” — those tiresome cliches . . . they are both real and offer an example of how to live well,’ the critic Charlotte Higgins has recently written. They fail and yet continue to desire; ‘they have both good days and bad.’
Swimming Home and Hot Milk won Booker nominations. That was in 2012 and 2016. But it is her most recent books, the trio of living autobiographies (Things I Don’t Want To Know, The Cost of Living, and Real Estate) — the ‘60-year-old female character’, Levy herself — that have brought her a truly cult following. The memoirs are slim, yet expansive in scope: Levy’s childhood in apartheid-torn South Africa, her failing marriage, and pursuit to find a room of one’s own are just some of the topics covered. They are great because they draw extract pithy wisdom from a time of being both ‘happy and extremely miserable.’ They are the books I reach for most often, talismanic, when I am in a slump, forgetting how to live.
Elsa Anderson slots into that Levy-verse well. Like the narrator of Levy’s memoirs, her voice comes to us in pared-back, often witty, prose. And like all of Levy’s characters, her experiences are charged with a particular kind of intensity. Every sense is heightened, every object significant. In a sun-drenched Greece, Elsa dives for sea urchins, then later devours their ‘slimy, salty insides.’ She uses ‘orange blossom hand cream’ and drinks mint liqueur in the Parisian rain. Shoes are one of Levy’s many motifs, and they are there in Elsa’s ‘high snakeskin heels’ early on. I underline it, smiling at having found them. Picture here the younger Levy in gold platform wedges, cantering off to her first job interview at the Notting Hill Gate cinema. She would begin wearing shoes that ‘tapped to the beat of rebellion.’ In August Blue, Elsa finds similar self-creation in glamour. Almond biscuits and belted trench coats become paperweights for an identity floating away.
It’s fun trying to spot all of Levy’s symbols, but I won’t spend forever working out what they mean. It’s better waiting to see where the plot-line takes me: now, diverging to the question of Elsa’s biological parents. Is this a necessary puzzle piece in Elsa’s identity quest? Her teacher, Arthur Goldstein, thinks so. He summons her to Sardinia where he’s dying. There, he insists that she reads her own adoption papers. Though the mystery of the double has so far driven the tension of August Blue, here, it converges with the mystery of Elsa’s past. The mechanical horses have already triggered a long-buried memory of her mother, a presence of ‘someone unknown, but who was nevertheless listening very attentively.’ Could this be who is really following Elsa? She wonders if the memory of her mother is ‘something I had seen, or [that I] perhaps summoned to comfort or torment myself.’ Memory is fickle at the best of times, but it’s even fickler here in amongst a mental breakdown.
There are more candidates for the double when we start looking for them. Clues already lie planted, seed-like, in Real Estate. The older narrator muses to her younger self that ‘you never know what a woman really wants because she’s always being told what she wants.’ What if a double could act out ‘what a woman really wants’? What she is too cowardly, too embarrassed, or too humble to want? Here, I get excited. Levy is pushing at something genius: that nebulous, sprawling thing, the homage to the life you have not lived. Or that is living you, somewhere else, all the time. ‘Everyone knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the thing that do,’ says the narrator in Claire Louise-Bennett’s Pond. I sit up. I have been reading August Blue on a bed facing a mirror, and seeing my own double, flinch.
Playing her own music instead of Rachmaninov’s. Avoiding her dying adoptive father, then caving. Elsa, like the narrator of Real Estate, is a woman working out what she ‘really wants’, and her desires and actions are running in haywired disarray. If Levy has been poking at this problem for some time (‘what would it be like to meet our identical human double buying a pint of milk on a Sunday morning?’ her narrator asks in Real Estate), it is possible that in August Blue she confronts it. The narrator of Real Estate is laughed at by a panel of film executives for proposing a female character who ‘follows all her desires.’ It strikes me that in August Blue, Levy has written that character, if only through the device of the double.
If I’m making August Blue sound challenging, it is. But that’s not forget that much of the book takes place in the fun of drinks and dinners with friends, enjoying the sunshine of the European locations Levy does so well. The novel’s main skill is that it is agile, bending between its witticisms and deep intellectual thought. On one page, we are presented with Elsa’s identity complex via a Freudian cigar, dropped in her drink (who did it: Elsa or her double?) And on the next, we return to the light: Elsa, missing her takeaway coffees in lockdown, wonders whether her ‘identity is so fragile it depends on a flat white to keep it together.’ It’s this dance between the two that makes August Blue most exciting, most reminiscent of Levy’s memoirs.
Sometimes, I think Levy only gets away with it because she is Deborah Levy. Images can occasionally feel tenuous: a difficult door is described as though it had ‘fathomless depths and the key were having sex with it.’ When the lockdowns end, Elsa declares that ‘we were striding out into the world once more to infect and be infected by each other.’ But these are perhaps lazy sentences in a host of thoughtful, intentional ones. Finishing August Blue, I decide that Levy can get away with whatever she wants.