Deborah Levy: The Woman Who Sees Everything
Deborah Levy is a British novelist, playwright and poet. In her early career she wrote mostly for the theatre before later switching to fiction. Her notable books include the Booker-shortlisted novels Swimming Home and Hot Milk, as well as the Booker-longlisted The Man Who Saw Everything.
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Deborah Levy
Early Life
Deborah Levy was born 1959 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her father, Norman, was a member of the African National Congress and a prominent anti-apartheid activist. He spent time in the Old Fort Prison awaiting trial with Nelson Mandela. After his release from another spell in prison he eventually decided to flee South Africa in 1968 with his wife Philippa and their children.
Arriving in the UK, the family lived above a men’s clothing shop in London where both parents worked. Her parents were divorced in 1974 when Deborah was 15.
After school she worked for a time in the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill and it was there she met her friend filmmaker Derek Jarman. Indeed it was Jarman that recommended she go to Dartington College of Arts in Devon, where she enrolled the next year to study theatre.
Work
After finishing up college in 1981, Levy would initially forge a path as a playwright. She wrote successful plays, Pax and Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Her first published work was a short story collection Ophelia and the Great Idea which was released in 1985. Her early novels were Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography and Billy and Girl. There was also a collection of poetry called An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell published in 1990.
It wasn’t until Swimming Home was released in 2011, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012, that her career really took off.
Personal Life
She married her husband, playwright David Gale in 1997. During this time she was teaching, adapting plays for the radio, raising two daughters, and living with her family in a unassuming house in north London. Her writing career met with modest success. However that was about to change, as was much of her life.
Living Legacy
In 2010, at the age of 50, the acclaimed writer was divorced and living in a new flat.
By 2012 Levy’s life was transformed. Her novel, Swimming Home – a sun-kissed tale about a family holiday on the French Riviera, was shortlisted for the 2012 Booker prize.
And since then, the success has continued. Black Vodka, a collection of 10 short stories was published in 2013. Another novel, Hot Milk was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and The Man Who Saw Everything was longlisted. In between she has published three volumes of her Living Autobiography, Things I Don’t Want to Know, Real Estate and The Cost of Living. In these she considers womanhood and writing with great insight.
In May 2023 her latest novel August Blue was released and it’s another masterpiece.
If you haven’t read any of Deborah Levy’s work then we would highly recommend you do. She’s a wonderful writer, her prose is unsurpassed and her work is very readable. Levy’s work has a unique quality, it seems to infiltrate the mind. You absorb her way of viewing the world and begin to experience it through her eyes.
Best Deborah Levy Books
Swimming Home
This is a mesmerizing portrayal of the ties that divide and bond an ordinary group of middle-class Londoners on vacation in the south of France. Each is gravely marked by their past, as each struggles to build a livable life in a social environment that gives little comfort or support under its mask of sunshine, beaches, and holiday manners.
At one level suspenseful and amusing with an atmospheric setting and interesting characters, and at the same time filmic and almost dreamlike as she examines the roots of mental illness.
Hot Milk
Two women arrive in a village on the Spanish coast. Rose is suffering from a strange illness and the doctors are mystified. Her daughter Sofia has brought her here to find a cure with the infamous and controversial Dr Gomez – a man of questionable methods and motives. Intoxicated by thick heat and the seductive people who move through it, both women begin to see their lives clearly for the first time in years.
Through the opposing figures of mother and daughter, Deborah Levy explores the strange and monstrous nature of womanhood. Dreamlike and utterly compulsive, Hot Milk is a delirious fairy tale of feminine potency, a story both modern and timeless.
August Blue
Elsa M. Anderson is a classical piano virtuoso. In a flea market in Athens, she watches an enigmatic woman buy two mechanical dancing horses. Is it possible that the woman who is so enchanted with the horses is her living double? Is she also looking for reasons to live?
Chasing their doubles across Europe, the two women grapple with their preconceived conceptions of the world and each other, culminating in a final encounter in a fateful summer rainstorm.
A vivid portrait of a long-held identity coming apart, August Blue expands our understanding of the ways in which we seek to find ourselves in others and create ourselves anew.
The Man Who Saw Everything
Saul leaves to study in communist East Berlin, two months before the Wall comes down. There he will encounter – significantly – both his assigned translator and his translator’s sister.
He will fall in love and brood upon his difficult, authoritarian father. And he will befriend a hippie, Rainer, who may or may not be a Stasi agent, but will certainly return to haunt him in middle age.
In 2016, Saul Adler is hit by a car on the Abbey Road. He is rushed to hospital, where he spends the following days slipping in and out of consciousness, and in and out of memories of the past. A number of people gather at his bedside. One of them is Jennifer Moreau. But someone important is missing.
Deborah Levy’s electrifying new novel examines what we see and what we fail to see, until we encounter the demons of history – both the world’s and our own.
The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography
The bestselling exploration of the dimensions of love, marriage, mourning, and kinship from Deborah Levy in a Living Autobiography.
What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse the social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage?
This vibrant memoir, a portrait of contemporary womanhood in flux, is an urgent quest to find an unwritten major female character who can exist more easily in the world. Levy considers what it means to live with meaning, value, and pleasure, to seize the ultimate freedom of writing our own lives, and reflects on the work of such artists and thinkers as Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Elena Ferrante, Marguerite Duras, David Lynch, and Emily Dickinson.
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