HOT MILK served Deborah Levy style.
Mother and daughter. London, Spain and Greece. A hot mess of meaning. Fab.
I’ve been trying to read Deborah Levy for some time. She has a reputation for an avant-garde style of fiction, amalgamated perhaps from her roots as a playwright and poet. However, each time I’ve tried one of her novels or short story collections, I’ve given up. I have a 100-page rule [max] when I read – if I’m not fully engaged or otherwise have a reason to read, the next on the pile gets its turn. I have, in truth, found Levy’s style admirable but hard to stay with – until I read HOT MILK, published in 2016, and short-listed for the Booker Prize.
She has just published a new novel, AUGUST BLUE, which I’ve not yet read, and which has received mixed reviews, so if you want to dip into fantastically crisp prose, quirky characters, a well-defined sense of place, a few in fact, and more than a few surprises, I recommend you read HOT MILK.
In fact, reading Deborah Levy may be exactly what we need to break out of the comfort zone we all tend to drift into by reading writers and stories that feel like an extension of our own lives, or lives we might have led, or would like to, rather than broadening our lens to lives we might not immediately relate to, but which offer a glimpse of what we might not otherwise understand.
[Reminder to read THE ORPHANAGE by Serhiy Zhadan, for the same reason, as well as superb writing.]
The beauty in fiction is the universal truths embedded in storytelling and metaphor, and the resulting, hopefully, greater sensitivity to others. Needed perhaps more than ever these days, as we line-up too neatly into our sociopolitical and emotional lanes.
By way of introduction to the sensitive, insightful, and deeply repressed protagonist of HOT Milk, Sofia, she tells us, My problem is that I want to smoke the cigar and for someone else to light it. I want to blow out smoke. Like a volcano. Like a monster.
The title itself might reflect mother’s milk and/or the hot mess of many of the characters. Sofia is a young woman adrift, working at a coffee house, and tending to her ill mother, Rose, who has a hold on her daughter so tight you will feel the grip. They travel from London to Spain to seek out alternative treatment with a doctor who is often menacing, but also amusing. He may in fact hold the key to both their futures.
My love for my mother is like an ax, Sofia says. It cuts very deep.
You are using your mother like a shield to protect yourself from making a life, the physician tells her, which is obvious to the reader, if not to Sofia.
In the end, this is a mother-daughter tale and like all mother-daughter relationships, even the best, fraught with the pull of that intractable cord.
If I blew on her name, ROSE, the letters would shuffle around and come out as EROS, the god of love, winged but lame.
But a difficult relationship with a mother is often facilitated by a father, in this case long gone, and who challenges Sofia to embrace his second wife and daughter. Yes, it’s complicated.
But his debts go back a long way. As a result of his first default, my mother has a mortgage on my life.
There is also menace in the sea, teeming with stinging jellyfish known as medusas. [Reminder: in Greek mythology, Medusa was both wronged and enraged.] When Sofia is stung, she is tended to by a young man in an injury hut [there’s a concept worth pursuing] who will become her lover, and who considers himself lucky to have a summer job on the beach while pursuing an advanced degree in philosophy. Yes, it’s complicated.
He is only one of the people Sofia gives herself to, lured by types she might have never been attracted to before, and she grows bolder by the page. I began to wonder if that jellyfish sting impacted her central nervous system.
I was as taken with the language as story or characters, and the structure shifts in style as well as place, another of Levy’s hallmarks. Some chapters are one paragraph long, as if to punctuate what’s been, or what’s to come. I often mulled over lines, like sipping a lovely wine. Mull this existential confession…
It wasn’t clarity I was after. I wanted things to be less clear.
Do not expect a coming-of-age novel or a feel-good tale; however Sofia will develop perspective and that is a triumph. As for the ending, no spoilers, just a quote: Is it easier to surrender to death than to life?
What I’ve learned for sure about Deborah Levy is that she is neither provincial nor conventional. That’s her charm. I get it now. Wow.
Happy reading.