Swimming Home
Familial bonds and female identity in the work of Deborah Levy
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After a discussion in the comments thread of my recent post on the joys of reading short novels, a reader reminded me of the brevity and brilliance of Swimming Home by Deborah Levy. After another comment from my friend in reading
where she asked if I would write a primer to the work of Levy as she had struggled a bit to see the brilliance of her writing, I willingly took up the challenge!I first came to Levy through her slim novel Swimming Home around a decade ago, when I was engaged in writing online reviews for an arts and culture website.
Levy’s first novel, Beautiful Mutants, appeared to great acclaim in 1989 and a volume of short stories followed later in the same year. Despite this, in 2011, after failing to secure a publisher for her novel Swimming Home (rejected for being ‘too literary’ for the marketplace), small independent publishing house And Other Stories decided to publish it.
Priding themselves on building a client list of writers who are often overlooked by mainstream publishing houses, including a lot of translated texts and a year of only publishing women in 2018, Swimming Home was one of the first three books they published, and the punt on Levy paid off: in 2012, the book made the Booker Prize shortlist.
It was Levy’s first novel in fifteen years, and it catapulted her back into the public eye.
In Swimming Home, Levy tells the sometimes strange story of Kitty Finch and her gatecrashing of the summer holiday of two middle-class families. The families are sharing a villa in south-east France in July of 1994 and Kitty is the stranger who they find swimming naked in their shared pool.
The central family consists of Isabel, a war reporter, her husband Joe, a poet, and their adolescent daughter, Nina. They share the villa with friends Mitchell and Laura, who run a business selling primitive weaponry as souvenirs.
After discovering the naked Kitty floating in their pool, Isabel, for her own reasons, invites Kitty to join them. Isabel and Joe’s marriage is in trouble, and her motives for inviting Kitty to stay are unclear. Kitty’s habit of wandering around the place naked acts as a catalyst for change in the couple’s marriage, and we are left to consider whether Isabel is keen to exploit whether their marriage can withstand such an interruption.
But Kitty is also vulnerable. Bringing with her her own poem to share with the poet Joe, which he does not wish to engage in, they find that this is not all that they have in common. Kitty has recently come off Seroxat, whereas Joe has written about his own treatment for depression:
“Give me your history and I will give you something to take it away".
Isabel, meanwhile, has her own issues after witnessing "human demolition" in her work as a war reporter. She has often been shattered by the knowledge and experience she has witnessed, and attempts to be "a powerful but fragile female character", clearly suffering from society's double standards on femininity.
"To do the things she had chosen to do in the world, she risked forfeiting her place as a wife and mother, a bewildering place haunted by all that had been imagined for her if she chose to sit in it."
In Kitty, meanwhile, Levy creates a complex character: an anorexic, who feels that Isabel is "controlling them all". Isabel's decision to let Kitty stay feels like a further controlling act of dominance, risking a spiralling out of control, whilst Joe sees his wife’s recording of catastrophe as an effort to: “...try and make people remember. He tried to make himself forget."
There is an unnerving sense to the book, where the reader feels as though they are constantly teetering on the brink of chaos, with plot lines subverted, a missing person, and a shock ending.
Levy cleverly switches between viewpoints to balance the attention amongst the characters, with Kitty, Joe, Isabel and Nina becoming the strongest voices within the narrative. Kitty befriends the confused, adolescent Nina, who has mother-issues with her often distant yet somewhat heroic mother Isabel. There is a sense of repetition to the text, which further lulls you deep into this story. It is so short that it could easily be completed in a sitting, and yet so much seems to happen; so many voices appear to give their versions. You feel throughout that the story cannot end well for all the characters; indeed, whether any of them come out unscathed is often in doubt.
It was one of those books that left me feeling breathless whilst reading, and so my indoctrination into the School of Levy had begun! I began to seek out more of her work.
Next, I turned to Hot Milk, a slightly longer novel which again tells the story of a holiday (of sorts) and has a strong mother/daughter relationship at its heart.
Sofia and her mother, Rose, have travelled to Southern Spain to a rented beach house. But this isn’t just a simple getaway: we learn that Rose has remortgaged her flat back home to come here, to attend a mysterious clinic run by a man named Gómez, in the hope that he can cure the mysterious paralysis that confines her to a wheelchair, binding her daughter Sofia to her in a claustrophobic, dependant relationship.
But they do not find a direct cure here: the doctor, who may or may not be some kind of charlatan, gives Rose and Sofia strange pronouncements which are difficult to unpack. The stifling heat, strangeness of the doctor’s clinic, a chained Alsatian on the beach that won’t stop barking, and a sea full of poisonous jellyfish, add to the air of confinement and brittle control that Sofia endures as her mother’s aide.
Many strange images appear throughout the text, including the vase Sofia smashes in the beach house, which acts as a reminder of Rose’s ex-husband who, we learn, abandoned both mother and daughter many years ago. In the shards, Sofia sees “the ruins that were once a whole civilisation”, acting as an image of her mother’s shattered life. Levy is excellent at implanting such images in the reader’s mind, leading you to question what is relevant and what is merely an isolated incident.
Such as the opening to Hot Milk, which begins with an aura of deceptive realism.
Sofia, whilst in a beachside bar, drops her laptop, shattering its screen. What appears to be a humorous comment: “My laptop has all my life in it and knows more about me than anyone else,” turns out to be an uncomfortable truth.
Sofia’s trip to Spain signifies the culmination of a young life on hold: her mother’s incessant demands have led her to her confusion of her inner self. She feels she has been “sleuthing my mother’s symptoms for as long as I can remember,” leading her to limp along with her mother at times, even though she is only twenty-five years old and a healthy young woman.
“My legs are her legs.”
The book is a fascinating study of truth and identity.
As someone who lost my own mother as a young woman, I could identify with some of Sofia’s sense of a stalled life; of the guilt of those feelings whilst simultaneously tugging at an invisible thread holding yourself in place to the person you cherish.
Sofia later becomes obsessed with a German seamstress, Ingrid Bauer, and gets stung by jellyfish, whereupon a young man named Juan comes to her aid. Sofia takes him as a lover, later abandoning her mother to visit her estranged father and his new young wife and baby in Athens. Though her father is a wealthy man, he gives her a storeroom with no window to sleep in and a camp bed that collapses as soon as she lies down on it.
Sofia is seen as floating through her own life with little control, similar to the jellyfish that proliferate the text, known as medusas in Spanish. These serve to drive the tourists away from the white-hot beach. We learn that back home, Sofia works as a barista, though she has a degree in anthropology. She completed her PhD in memory; a clever mirroring of her experience as her father’s new family erases her past, and her mother’s illness (imagined or real) devours her present. Her experiences with Ingrid and Juan, meanwhile, are transient and unstable.
Hot Milk is a novel of the interior life of Sofia, which Levy creates with a vividness that has been compared to that of Virginia Woolf. There is a mesmerising, symbolic symmetry to the text. The ‘hot’ in the title burns throughout the story and the setting to ignite the imagination and the claustrophobia of Sofia’s lack of agency amidst her mother’s domineering and controlling illness.
Hot Milk was published by Penguin Random House in 2016. Clearly, the Booker nomination had led to a new interest in Levy as a novelist, and Hot Milk also went on to be shortlisted for the Prize. It shares many of the themes set forth in Levy’s earlier novel Swimming Home; a sun-bleached, Mediterranean setting; troubled familial bonds; the nature of sexuality; an examination of exile; female identity; and a repetition of motifs described in hypnotic, incantatory language.
“My love for my mother is like an axe…It cuts very deep.”
Both of these novels sit amongst some of the best I have encountered, but Levy has also become known for her autobiographical works, which she has written in three parts thus far: Things I don’t want to Know: On Writing, The Cost of Living and Real Estate.
Levy refers to these three volumes as her ‘Living autobiography’, the first of which she released in 2013 as an apparent response to George Orwell’s essay ‘Why I Write.’ In it, Levy relives her childhood spent in South Africa, as well as the emigration of her family to England in 1974, after her anti-apartheid activist father was released from prison.
In between these two elements of the book are her descriptions of her time in Majorca having left London:
“That spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn't see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations.”
In 2018, Levy released The Cost of Living, which would have been an ideal title for the whole set had it been combined in one volume.
This volume details the year she separates from her husband and lives alone with her children, living, in her own words, “in the Republic of Writing and Children.”
In this volume, Levy reflects on both the past and present as a woman, a mother and a writer. Now divorced from the father of her two daughters’, she sees her life as unpredictable and unstable. She has moved to a new home, which features in her final volume, Real Estate.
There are undoubtedly some brilliant moments in Levy’s accounts, such as the scene of Levy attending a newsagents to purchase a particular flavour of ice lolly for her dying mother. The almost out-of-body arrangement of grief and decision making is perfectly encapsulated in this scene.
The autobiographies, like Levy’s other books, are fairly short and succinct. The final volume, Real Estate, being the longest of the three.
Now nearing age 60, in this third volume, Levy has begun to take stock. Seeking a home to call her own following her divorce, she attempts to shape a new life, one that she did not expect to be making.
“I was also searching for a house in which I could live and work and make a world at my own pace, but even in my imagination this home was blurred, undefined, not real, or not realistic, or lacked realism…the wish for this home was intense.”
As with Levy’s previous two volumes, Real Estate does not follow along a linear path. She moves through various places, homes, and relationships with friends. Finally finding herself writing in a rented house in Greece, she comes to a realisation about what is her true foundation, her ‘real’ estate:
“I wrote every day in its long, timbered attic and finally acknowledged I did not have a tranquil relationship with language because I am in love with it. I asked myself, what sort of love? Language is a building site. It is always in the process of being constructed and repaired. It can fall apart and be made again.”
This summing up of her experience of a life spent wrangling with language; of the metaphorical and literal building of her books and the rebuilding of her life feels apt: her three slim ‘living autobiographies’ serve as an opening up of the mind of a writer. Further, it is the opening up of a divorced mother-writer in the twenty-first century, with all her complexities and wrangles with identity and ideas of place and time.
Despite all that, I would like to be honest here and say: I haven’t loved everything that Levy has written. I found her three living autobiographies, at times, a little dull but with pockets of enlightenment, and her novels and short stories are often a little on the surreal side for me.
However, the brilliance of the two novels Swimming Home and Hot Milk are such that they sit in my camp of best read novels of all time. This alone encourages me to continue to discover more of her work. As such, I cannot claim to be an aficionado on her writing. I am simply a fan of her writing style and wrangling of language; of her sometimes painfully astute recognition of the complexities of identity; and of her portrayals of the joys and pains of being a woman in the world.
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This was a great read. It is so good to see smaller publishers take a risk on someone and that really paid off. Great piece.
Thank you for this insightful post. Even when I don’t love Levy (loved Hot Milk and Swimming Home; The Man Who Saw Everything less) there is always something to be gleaned. The Cost of Living has a permanent spot on my desk with the other books I turn to when I’m feeling stuck or frustrated.