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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Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

Published by Bloomsbury USA on September 14, 2012 

"Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely." So says Kitty Finch, the central character in Swimming Home, a powerful, offbeat novel that explores the impact an intruding outsider has on the relationships of two couples who are sharing a vacation home in the Alps-Maritimes. Whether any of the vacationers will get home safely becomes the novel's burning question.

Philandering London poet Joe Jacobs (formally known as Jozef Nowogrodski), together with his wife Isabel (a war correspondent) and daughter Nina, are spending the summer of 1994 with Laura and Mitchell, the owners of a failing shop in Euston. The friends are enjoying the sun when they see a naked woman floating in the pool. The swimmer, Kitty French, isn't exactly stalking Joe Jacobs, but it's no coincidence that she's appeared at the villa. Isabel soon asks Kitty to stay on as a guest, a decision that surprises everyone else. Also vexed by Kitty's arrival is a neighbor, Dr. Madeleine Sheridan, who has an unhappy history with Kitty. Madeleine believes "human beings had to suffer real hardships before agreeing to lose their minds" and can find no excuse for Kitty's aberrant behavior.

Kitty clearly has mental health issues. She spends much of her time naked, she's off her antidepressants, and she was once institutionalized and subjected to shock treatments. Kitty seems determined to have Joe read a poem she has written ("Swimming Home"), which she describes as a conversation with Joe and no one else. Believing she has a psychic connection with Joe (she calls it a "nerve contact"), she wants to save Joe from his thoughts, while Joe wants to save himself from Kitty's poetry (and from her depression because, according to Joe, poems written by the depressed always constitute a threat). The text of Kitty's poem is not shared with the reader but its key content is revealed after Nina (perhaps the most well-adjusted of the book's characters) sneaks a peek at it.

Puzzling out the intriguing relationships between the characters is both difficult and rewarding. Why does Isabel (as Madeleine observes) all but push Kitty into Joe's arms? Why is Joe so hesitant to discuss Kitty's poem with her? Why does Madeleine need to be needed by Isabel? Why does Isabel stay with Joe? How does Joe really feel about Kitty? Can Kitty save Joe from his thoughts? Why is Nina so disturbed by what she sees under Joe's bed? Sometimes Deborah Levy answers the questions, sometimes she offers hints, sometimes she leaves the reader to speculate. Yet Levy plays fair; this is a tightly woven novel, not a collection of loose threads. With a bit of thought, every question can be answered to the reader's satisfaction.

Laura and Mitchell turn out to be minor characters but Kitty, Joe, Isabel, and Nina are developed in rich detail. Despite the novel's brevity, we come to know other minor characters well (including cantankerous Madeleine and a character we never meet, the owner of the vacation home).

Although the story's harshness is softened with moments of wit and quirky humor, readers who search for likable characters and happy endings will want to bypass Swimming Home. The characters are coping (or not) with pain in ways that make them disagreeably self-absorbed. Many readers will nonetheless find, as I did, that the intensity of the characters' interactions, the lyricism of the prose, and the profound questions that Levy explores make Swimming Home a captivating read.

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