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A review by joanaprneves
August Blue by Deborah Levy
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
Hot Milk by the same author is one of my favorite books. I also love the autobiographical trilogy by Levy. But mostly, I love her writing style. Perhaps style is not even a good word for it: her writing eye, as it were. She has the ability to describe an embodied mind with a very subtle, precise and sharp form of writing. She can state something terrible and then focus on what kind of sugar container the coffee is bright with. Which is how we usually experience things: our mind focus on the world around us at painful or exhilarating times and the objects that draw our attention then stick to those feelings and become what we usually call symbols. But Levy doesn’t let these things become anything other than what they are. She teaches us how it is us, embodied, sentient beings, who braid meanings and stuff together. It is a dynamic. She never wants us to cling to the characters through identification or even representation.
That said, Hot Milk was a deeper and more substantial read than August Blue. It is a pandemic book so it comes across as aloof at times, disconnected and self-involved. Nevertheless, I will re-read it because the writing is so powerful at times. It could awaken the dead with its pulsating vivacity. But as a book there were too many loose ends, even for a fragmented, at times almost surreal, narrative. The development of the relation with mothers and fathers is not completely unfolded- not in a plot driven way but in a philosophical one, as it is in Hot Milk. I find that Levy gives in too much to a sort of last century sense of European existence that doesn’t make much sense in a climate change, pandemic riddled time. The travels to Greece and Italy feel indulgent even if we can tell that they are not superficially undergone. The erotic relation with the mother and the doppelgänger is however powerfully narrated. The femininity of the characters is there alongside a non-binary hind, which is lovely and opens up a diversity of genderings that even questions the relations with the female body and the many phallic references.
Love Levy and hopefully this is a transitional book that will take her somewhere else as the chapter with mothers and female shadows perhaps is now closed.
That said, Hot Milk was a deeper and more substantial read than August Blue. It is a pandemic book so it comes across as aloof at times, disconnected and self-involved. Nevertheless, I will re-read it because the writing is so powerful at times. It could awaken the dead with its pulsating vivacity. But as a book there were too many loose ends, even for a fragmented, at times almost surreal, narrative. The development of the relation with mothers and fathers is not completely unfolded- not in a plot driven way but in a philosophical one, as it is in Hot Milk. I find that Levy gives in too much to a sort of last century sense of European existence that doesn’t make much sense in a climate change, pandemic riddled time. The travels to Greece and Italy feel indulgent even if we can tell that they are not superficially undergone. The erotic relation with the mother and the doppelgänger is however powerfully narrated. The femininity of the characters is there alongside a non-binary hind, which is lovely and opens up a diversity of genderings that even questions the relations with the female body and the many phallic references.
Love Levy and hopefully this is a transitional book that will take her somewhere else as the chapter with mothers and female shadows perhaps is now closed.