On a recent morning at a Turkish café in north London, Deborah Levy untied a silk scarf around her neck in preparation. “Breakfast to share has arrived,” I announce as a plate of fruit, cheese and fried eggs is placed in front of her.
In Levy’s new novel, August Blue, a blue-haired piano virtuoso named Elsa M. Anderson repeatedly encounters a woman who she believes is her alter ego. Her sightings also occurred in Athens and Paris, as well as during an elaborate Mediterranean breakfast at the same café in London.
August Blue is Levy’s eighth novel, and since her twenties she has honed her ability to evoke emotions through writing rather than telling them. Her work is deeply influenced by art forms such as film and dance that express her embodied experiences. “A body in this world,” she said. “How difficult! That’s my subject.”
Born in South Africa and immigrated to England at an early age, Levy, 63, is a poet, playwright and author. Critic Parul Segal, writing for The New York Times, described Levy’s lucid prose as “witty” and leaving a “pleasing sting”, and Levy was twice a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. ing. In 2020, she won France’s prestigious Femina Étranger Award for her memoirs What You Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living. “
In the ten years since the publication of his first memoir, Levy has written at a prolific pace, publishing six other books and finding new commercial success in the United Kingdom and the United States. “She’s like she’s lit up,” Levi’s editor Simon Prosser said.
Over breakfast, she said her memoir, “a living autobiography,” is a complex perspective on the existence of women at the unfashionable ages of 40 and 50. Her third book, Real Estate, will be published in 2021 and marks her 60th birthday. her birthday in Paris. Levy lived there for a year during her fellowship at Columbia University’s Idea and Imagination Institute, where she studied doppelgänger ideas. Her research has become “August Blue” and will be published in the United States. Farrar, Strauss, Giroud June 6th.
“August Blue” begins at a busy flea market in Athens, where Elsa watches over part of her face covered by a face mask. “They both make fun of each other,” Levy said.
She said she liked the eerieness of the imagery, which was inspired by films by David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock, especially Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1991 thriller The Double Life of Veronique. . But she said doubles in these films were “always sinister,” Levy said. What if Elsa had a little more fun with her doppelganger?The character “she’s distracted by it, she’s frightened by it, she’s excited by it,” she said in a low voice as Levi leaned over the table.
In writing “August Blue”, Levy liked the idea of using a doppelganger to explore the mind and how “we all speak to ourselves”. She said she explored Freud’s concept of duality as the physical manifestation of a separate or split self.
Although Levy’s prose is economical, Levy’s writing is psychologically complex, and Prosser believes that there is an ‘undercurrent’ ‘below the surface of beautifully arranged words’ that influences her work. Said it gave me strength.
The novel was also guided by the use of repetition and structure in the music of the minimalist composer Philip Glass. “I actually think he’s a maximalist,” she says. “It’s as if he kindled a fire underneath all the emotions I was thinking about at the time.”
Levy, she said, learned how to “concrete ideas” in writing during the formative years of experimental theater and the movement. Encouraged by film director Derek Jarman, whom she met while working in a London cinema as a teenager, she trained at the Dartington College of the Arts on the English coast in the early 1980s.
Citing an experimental liberal arts college in North Carolina, she described the interdisciplinary education there as “probably a bit like Black Mountain School.” She spent the next two decades writing plays, short stories, poetry, and novels, teaching writing since the early 2000s, and raising two daughters.
Prosser, who has been Levi’s editor since 2013, said he “really got” Levi for the first time in 2012 when her novel Swimming Home was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. . “There is complete clarity in her writing,” he says. He signed her to Penguin publisher Hamish Hamilton to republish her out-of-print early novels.
By this time, Levi’s star was on the rise, but her marriage was coming to an end. She wrote about this tension in “The Cost of Living,” which follows her quest to invent new templates for both her creative and domestic life as a single woman entering middle age.
“Generations leave a trail of breadcrumbs for other writers to add,” she said of her living autobiographical trilogy. “Do you think we should have a quartet?” she asked conspiratorially.
In Paris, Levi’s peers were also impressed by her way of life template. Levy spent a year there studying doppelgängers and being integrated into a community of other artists, which she recalled as one of “contemplation and thinking, great libraries and great food.” At the institute, author and film director Guo Xiaoluo’s office was directly below Levy’s.
Guo, who is also a memoirist, said in a telephone interview that he and Levi “shared a sense of camaraderie as mothers and tried to maintain a certain amount of freedom while raising children.” have great qualities to live in,” he added.
Several of Levy’s novels center on family relationships, two of which have been made into movies: Swimming Home and Hot Milk. Levi isn’t involved in either project, but she adapted “August Blue” and the 2019 novel “The Man Who Saw It All,” and this time she says she wants to write the script herself. said.
“Hot Milk” stars Emma Mackey (“Sex Education”), Vicky Krieps (“Phantom Thread”) and Fiona Shaw (“Killing Eve”). This novel tells the story of a young English woman who takes her hypochondriac mother to a Spanish clinic in search of a cure.
“She writes about silence in a cinematic way,” Creeps said in a recent video interview. “You feel the silence, and you see the silence,” she added. She said that she had been a fan of Levi’s script even before she joined the film, Creeps said she found Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Hot Milk script “downright weird” and therefore closer to the spirit of the novel. she said it was.
“It takes courage as a woman to write, show, and embody queerness,” she added.
