As Deborah Levy returns with her eighth novel, ‘August Blue’, Sophie Morris explains why her dream-like stories are a middle-age must read
Deborah Levy
“If she is not too defeated by the society story, she will change the story,” Deborah Levy observes in 2018’s The Cost of Living, the second of a trilogy she calls her “living autobiographies”. She was writing about what it cost to leave her husband, father to her two young daughters, in the early years of this century. “Life falls apart,” she writes. “We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realise we don’t want to hold it together.”
Deborah Levy is far from defeated. Today, at 63, she publishes her eighth novel, August Blue. As with any output from the South Africanborn, London-raised author in the past decade, it is a literary event; her three previous novels were all nominated for the Booker Prize and in 2020 she won the Prix Femina Ă©tranger, France’s principal literary award for works in translation.
Levy has always written. Originally a poet and playwright, she released her first novel, Beautiful Mutants, about a mysterious Russian exile, in 1987 when she was 27. Thirty-five years later, the acute wisdom of Levy’s memoirs along with the liberating sizzle of her more recent fiction have made her a middle-age must-read.
Partly, this comes from her dedicated examination of themes such as marriage, children and divorce. And partly it comes from the fact that Levy’s literary stardom came in her fifties and beyond, with Swimming Home, her first Bookernominated novel, published in 2011 when she was 52.
It had been 15 years since Levy had last published a novel and Swimming Home, about a British poet on holiday in the French Riviera, initially struggled to secure a publisher, before finding acclaim with the independent And Other Stories.
Publishing is criticised for privileging young and debut authors over the experience and range of perspectives age can bring. But Levy is not a lone voice.
This year the Women’s Prize shortlist features five writers over 50 and one 49-year-old. A new prize for debut authors over 50 was announced at last month’s London Book Fair. Women over 45 are by far the biggest book-buying demographic. Why wouldn’t they want to hear from their own?
If you, like Levy, have an “unexplained” gap on your CV - the penalty of raising children - the story of her tremendous rise from the ashes of domesticity is exhilarating. She shook off a life that no longer worked for her, and came back stronger than before.
She proves it is possible to find success later in life, both personally and professionally, and her knack for reinvention reframes middle age as a time of renewal and possibility.
It is a strange truth that Levy, whose writing is decidedly literary, inspires the sort of fandom more often directed at self-help gurus or romance novelists. Her novels and many stories are replete with classical references, grand themes, recurring motifs and existential quests.
But somehow, never mind the dream states and obfuscation, she speaks directly to readers, leaving the impression that despite the physicality of words on a page and a book in the hands, there is no separation between storyteller and supplicant.
She ignites Eat, Pray, Love-style obsessions even when writing an uncanny and time-bending tale about 20th-century European history with a male protagonist, as in her last novel, The Man Who Saw Everything, published in 2019. Whatever your malaise, trust me, Levy has your back.
The star of her new book is Elsa M Anderson, a famous pianist in retreat from public life after walking off stage during a performance of Rachmaninov in Vienna. She flees to Greece, heading for a teaching job on the island of Poros, but in Athens sees a woman she feels is her double, who buys and disappears with a pair of mechanical horses that Elsa is certain belong to her. She sees this woman again in London, and then Paris.
Elsa’s journey is primal: she has never known who her birth parents are and is searching for herself. When she was six, her foster parents gave her to her teacher and surrogate father, Arthur Goldstein. As Arthur approaches death, Elsa confronts the prospect of excavating her past.
At one point Elsa replays the disastrous concert in her head and hears the woman’s voice. “Maybe you are, she said. Maybe I am what? Looking for signs. What sort of signs? Reasons to live.”
Levy’s work is flooded with signs. Dreams return. Time twists. Language repeats itself like a gentle tide, building to stormy climaxes. Her enthusiasm for Freudian suggestion and surreal imagery reference the 20th century when she came of age and practised her craft, but her work also feels specifically contemporary and spectacularly ageless.
August Blue takes place as the pandemic rumbles on across Europe. There are face masks and fear, but these don’t date the story in the slightest.
In an industry that often demands writing for and about women be commercial, current, popular, Levy stands out as a cultish voice who has always refused to conform, whether to linear narratives or playing the good wife.
In The Cost of Living she describes, in her forties, “unmaking the home that I’d spent much of my life’s energy creating”. Behind the wallpaper of the “fairy tale of The Family House”, she writes, is “an unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted womanÂ… It is an act of immense generosity to be the architect of everyone else’s well-being.” Levy moved to a “large, shabby apartment block on the top of a hill”, and in doing so became a prototype for women refusing to put up with their lot in life.
Levy has changed the story of her own life many times. She was born in Johannesburg in 1959. In 1968 after her father, a member of the African National Congress and friend of Nelson Mandela, served four years in jail and wasn’t allowed to work, her family moved to London.
Her parents’ marriage did not survive the stress of the move, but Levy did. She attended art college and wrote plays and novels throughout her twenties and thirties.
I don’t normally go in for literary fandom, but when I first heard her talk, in 2017 after reading Hot Milk, I queued up for her to sign my paperback. “Sophie, you are in this book,” she wrote, referencing her protagonist, Sofia, who travels with her mother to Spain in search of a cure for her mother’s mystery illness.
I find the inscription oddly comforting - odd because Sofia does not have an easy time of caring for her mother. Levy herself was fabulous, in knee-high heeled boots, hair piled on top of her head, brilliant lipstick.
August Blue is partly set in Paris’s St Germain neighbourhood, which Levy has called home for several years. She tells the story of moving there in 2021’s Real Estate, the third and final autobiography.
On the eve of Levy’s 60th birthday, her two daughters both grown and living elsewhere, she found herself with no valuable bricks and mortar of her own. She decided that if she couldn’t have a house of her own, she must begin the search for her home, and work out what her legacy would be.
In Paris, she begins another new chapter, throwing her 60th birthday party in an exclusive club called Silencio, designed by David Lynch, who she says inspired her approach to fiction.
One of her new friends DJ’d. “My daughters couldn’t believe their mother was so cool.” Her personal real estate is, of course, her writing.
And while her books in many ways speak to thirty- or forty-plus life, she’ll most certainly appeal to the next generation of readers - and the next.
She writes characters of all ages, and the freedom with which she lives and creates is especially alluring to young women, like her daughters and their friends who used to crowd around her dinner table for bowls of pasta.
In The Cost of Living she thinks a young English woman, “perhaps 19 years old” and travelling the world alone, might be the “right reader” for her story.
Tonight she will talk at the London Review Bookshop, not with another novelist but with the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, author of The Examined Life. Levy urges her readers to find the courage to examine their own lives. Elsa finally manages this in August Blue, turning to the chaos of her past to search for meaning.
“Chaos,” writes Levy, “is supposed to be what we most fear, but I have come to believe it might be what we most want.”