He Cost of Living by Deborah Levy Review – a Memoir and Feminist Manifesto
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Stepping Out of Graphic symbol and Starting a New Story
"Why not steal a fish from the market to make you bolder?"
That'southward the unconventional communication a md in southern Kingdom of spain gives to Sofia, the young anthropologist who is the hero of Deborah Levy'south amazing novel "Hot Milk" (2016). Sofia has decided to lean into her life. With luck she will besides stay out of jail.
The result is one of the more memorable scenes in recent fiction.
Sofia goes to a fish market. She debates pilfering a monkfish or some "whiskery langoustines" earlier deciding on a fish with furious eyes, "a plump dorado in a rage."
She purloins it. She gets it dwelling and cuts it open. At that place is so much blood inside that if someone "banged on the door to claim their stolen goods, I would literally accept been caught reddish-handed."
One absorbs this scene and its instant repercussions and thinks: The next fourth dimension someone proposes walking across hot coals as an improving ritual, offering as a counterproposal to steal a dorado.
Levy, who was born in South Africa and raised in that location and in England, is an enduring writer. Her two about recent novels, "Hot Milk" and "Pond Home" (2012), were each finalists for the Human Booker Prize.
They're yearning, jaggedly smart and drolly comic devices that are in large part about women who long for freedom and foreign experience; they're well-nigh women who have come to sense they're not locked into their lives and stories, characters who have a heliotropic urge to turn to face the cleansing sunlight.
Levy'southward new book, a slim memoir titled "The Cost of Living," is the follow-upward to an even slimmer memoir titled "Things I Don't Want to Know" (2013). Each is, in its way, virtually the author's attempts to learn to wrest control of her life.
Every bit she put it in the earlier memoir, "To speak up is non about speaking louder, it is nearly feeling entitled to vocalism a wish."
Levy has written many other books and plays besides those mentioned here, including a novella I am drastic to read called "Diary of a Steak" (1997). It is written from the perspective of a piece of meat in a butcher's shop. Alas, it is out of print and used copies are dear.
The way to read Levy is in bulk. Her two most recent novels and two memoirs are of a piece. To get the total issue of her elliptical genius, yous demand to choice them off all at in one case, the way you lot would a pint of blueberries or back problems of The Sewanee Review.
These four books together don't make a alpine stack. The full page count is less than that of a typical volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard's "My Struggle" series.
Epitome
Yous should read them together because Levy permits a number of resonant themes and images, melodies and countermelodies, to course through all four of these books. These images overlap as if in waking dreams.
In that location are unhappily chained or caged animals; in that location are stinging creatures (bees and jellyfish); there are odd moments of social discomposure, from attending an important meeting with muddy leaves in i's hair to accidentally leaving your shirt unbuttoned.
There is a longing for sun and southern climates. There are ill mothers and absent-minded fathers. People are asked to read things they are not certain they want to read. Words are inked onto easily and other unusual places. There is a sense — Rachel Cusk, a author whom Levy resembles, too takes up this idea — that humans (and especially men) are bottomless at asking other humans questions.
At that place are shocking moments related to food. In "The Cost of Living," Levy bicycles home with a book by Freud and a whole chicken in her bag. When the bag splits open, a auto runs over and flattens her chicken.
Levy genially serves information technology for dinner anyway to a friend, her own daughter and some of her daughter's friends. This is horrifying until one considers the benefits of extreme spatchcocking.
"The Cost of Living" is about how Levy escaped a suffocating matrimony and, at roughly historic period l, began to take herself seriously as an artist and every bit an individual soul. "What would it cost to step out of character and terminate the story?" she asks.
After her separation, she moves with her children to a common cold and somewhat shabby apartment to brainstorm life afresh. She has nowhere to write and she has deep money woes, but she learns the most key of literary lessons: "The writing life is mostly about stamina."
Away from her desk, Levy is interested in "creating a persona that was braver than I really felt." She says: "It is and so hard to claim our desires and so much more than relaxing to mock them." She further wants, to steal a line from an Elizabeth Hardwick novel, "love and booze and dress on the flooring."
The essayist in her has a good deal to say about female person experience. "It was possible that femininity, as I had been taught it, had come to an end," she writes. "Femininity, equally a cultural personality, was no longer expressive for me. It was obvious that femininity, as written by men and performed by women, was the exhausted phantom that still haunted the early on 21st century."
Levy leans on her themes more heavily in her memoirs than she does in her novels. If I were forced at gunpoint to select just ii of her about recent 4 books, I'd take the fiction.
Merely so many small moments of quotidian grace and wit also filter through "The Cost of Living" — while she is discussing melons or plumbing or garden writing sheds — that it is e'er a pleasure to consume.
She isn't collecting her thoughts here so much equally she is purposefully discollecting them. Calm and club, she suggests, are vastly overrated.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/books/review-cost-of-living-deborah-levy.html
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