August Blue by Deborah Levy

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 6, 2023

As a foster child, Ann Anderson was adopted by Arthur Goldstein, a famous piano teacher who lived near London. She has always refused to read her adoption file and does not know the identity of her biological parents. Arthur changed her first name to Elsa (her middle name is Miracle) and trained her until she attained critical acclaim as a concert pianist.

After dying her hair blue, Elsa messed up while playing Rachmaninov during a concert in Vienna. For two minutes and twelve seconds (a time frame that recurs throughout the novel), Elsa played something that was in her mind, not on the sheet music, something that one listener regarded as remarkable. Elsa then walked off the stage and fled to Greece, where the novel begins.

A woman who looks very much like Elsa purchases some small mechanical horses that Elsa wanted to buy. Elsa seems to have stolen the woman’s hat. Elsa believes she saw the same woman in London. She sees her again in Paris. The woman throws her cigar into Elsa’s drink and runs away. Elsa regards the woman as her psychic double. Could it be that Elsa is seeing herself? Is she seeing the mother who gave her up for adoption? Elsa doesn’t smoke cigars but a student tells her that she smells like cigar smoke. Maybe an English lit professor will read the book and explain it to me.

Elsa gives piano lessons to rich kids during the pandemic as she contemplates whether her career is over. She almost makes love in Greece with a man named Tomas but ultimately pushes him away. Elsa teaches piano to a mentally fragile girl of sixteen in Paris, returns to London, and finally reunites with Arthur on his deathbed in Sardinia, where he is being attended by a longtime friend who has always disliked Elsa. She finds the answers to some of her questions in Sardinia but realizes that her piano teacher has always given her the answers she needs.

While Elsa’s questions are to some extent answered, the reader’s are not. Elsa meets her doppelganger again — they chat and smoke cigars — but the woman’s identity remains a mystery. Elsa comes to wonder whether the woman is her opposite: knowing, sane, and wise, while Elsa is unknowing, crazy, and foolish. Yet they enjoy the same lip balm and both love pets. Whether the woman is real or imagined is presumably unimportant; her role is to force Elsa to think about who she is and who she might become.

I like Deborah Levy’s use of repeating rhythms in her prose, a technique that makes sense in the story of a musician. I like her riff on Montaigne’s “Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man may lay his head.” Elsa would prefer the comfort of ignorance (as do so many people who live in an alternate, fact-free reality), but she forces herself to confront truth before the novel ends. Just what that truth might be is a bit ambiguous, but at least she’s moving toward it. While the novel’s ambiguity is a bit much for me, the story is interesting and Levy’s prose is seductive.

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