Based on a suggestion from Nicie, author of the fabulous newsletter Frugal Chariot, I got audiobook versions of Deborah Levy’s autobiographical trilogy, Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living, and Real Estate. I’ve read the first two of these books on paper, the first one twice, and have the third on my shelves, ready to read soon. I just finished the audiobook of Things I Don’t Want to Know, read by Juliet Stevenson who is fabulous. After my third reading of this book, I’m marveling at the artistry of it.
Things I Don’t Want to Know is barely over 100 pages, and in it she moves from visiting Majorca as an adult during an emotional crisis, to her South African childhood, her teenage years in England, and back to Majorca. Here’s how the book opens:
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. Going down them was fine but there was something about standing still and being carried upwards that did it.
She’s emotionally stuck, for reasons she doesn’t get into, and her trip to Majorca is meant as an escape and a way of traveling somewhere she chooses rather finding herself passively taken places on escalators as if by magic. In Majorca, she has an impromptu dinner with a local shopkeeper and tells him stories from her childhood. That’s how the narrative shifts to South Africa and on from there.
When I first read the book, I was so taken with the story of Levy’s middle-aged breakdown that I was a little disappointed when the narrative shifted to the childhood section, where it stays for most of the remaining pages. The narrative felt disjointed — not in a bad way, I like disjointed narratives — but in a jolting, jarring way I wasn’t sure what to make of.
But this is a book that consists of stitched-together pieces, and its brilliance lies in how evocative each piece is and how each one speaks to the others. Levy has a genius for picking exactly the right detail. She doesn’t often editorialize or explain; instead, she describes scenes and the emotions she felt at the time, and then moves on, leaving room for readers to make sense of what she has written. The book feels spacious. It leaps lightly from place to place, person to person, feeling to feeling, each thing brought to life so that it lingers in the mind.
From the first Majorca section, there’s Maria, the hotel manager whom Levy hears sobbing, and there’s the unplayed piano. In South Africa, it’s another Maria, this time with another name, Zama, a Zulu woman and Levy’s nanny. Levy loved her as a child but wasn’t sure Maria/Zama loved her back. Only later does she realize the difficulty of her position and how tired she likely was. There are also the nuns at the school Levy attends while living with her godmother, the nuns who taught Levy the alphabet not knowing that she already knew it, because she was too shy to tell them. There is the godmother’s budgie, beloved and pampered but, Levy feels, cruelly imprisoned.
In England, there is the washing machine full of bees and Levy’s stung and swollen hand, and the diner napkin with the word “England” on it. There’s the au pair from Cairo writing his dissertation on Marx and his frustration with the lids in the family’s kitchen that absolutely will not stay on the appropriate jars.
Each of these images and many more point toward the ideas Levy is exploring: finding her voice in a world that doesn’t want to hear her; untapped, unused power and potential, particularly of women; repressed memories, especially those we repress in order to function in the world; being of two worlds and not knowing which one is home; the longing for change but not knowing how to make it happen; language and political power and who gets to wield this power, including who gets to choose their own name.
And, of course, it’s a book about becoming a writer. The U.S. edition from Bloomsbury has the subtitle “On Writing” and the British edition from Notting Hill is subtitled “A Response to George Orwell’s 1946 Essay ‘Why I Write,’” with the line, “To become a writer I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then louder, and then to just speak in my own voice which is not loud at all” on the cover.
The book is also a response to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Woolf’s claim that a woman writer is “at war with her own lot.” Things I Don’t Want to Know records Levy’s version of this war — including battles past and present — and her struggle to figure out how to move forward.
Her conclusion is not the same as Woolf’s, and she comes to this conclusion not by formal argumentation, but by reliving and recreating for the reader the memories she had up until then wanted to avoid. It’s a document of Levy’s thinking through moments, images, people, and places, letting them return with all their original uncertainty and pain, in order to find their place on the page. This process leads her back to her laptop, ready to write again.
The uncertainty I felt about the book’s structure on my first reading dissolved as I reread and got a better sense of everything Levy’s disjointed pieces add up to. And, as it turns out, the second book in the trilogy returns to the middle-age struggles that caught my attention in the beginning of the first one. And now I will read the third to see what fascinating places Levy takes us to next.
Publishing This Week
New (mostly) small-press books out recently that I haven’t yet read and am adding to my TBR. All quotations below are from the publisher:
Where You Come From by Sasa Stanisic, translated by Damion Searls (Tin House): “In August, 1992, a boy and his mother flee the war in Yugoslavia and arrive in Germany. Six months later, the boy's father joins them, bringing a brown suitcase, insomnia, and a scar on his thigh.” The novel blends “autofiction, fable, and choose-your-own-adventure.”
The Book of Casey Adair by Ken Harvey (University of Wisconsin Press): This one comes recommended by my Twitter friend and a literary agent with exquisite taste, Akin Akinwumi. From the publisher: “In the fall of 1980, young Casey Adair begins a year of postgraduate theater research in Spain, then on the verge of a military coup. As he attends plays and dinner parties, visits gay bars, and becomes increasingly involved in protests, Casey’s correspondence reveals intimate confessions and new understandings.”
White on White by Ayşegül Savaş (Riverhead): A novel “about a woman who has come undone”: “A student moves to the city to research Gothic nudes, renting an apartment from a painter, Agnes, who lives in another town with her husband. One day, Agnes arrives in the city and settles into the upstairs studio.”
The Hotel by Sophie Calle (Siglio): “Working as a chambermaid for the Hotel C. in Venice, Italy, Sophie Calle stashes her camera and tape recorder in her mop bucket, so that as she cleans and tidies, she can also sort through the evidence of the hotel guests’ lives.”
The Child by Kjersti Skomsvold, translated by Martin Aitken (Open Letter): “A young mother speaks to her second born child. Since the drama of childbirth, all feels calm. The world is new and full of surprises, even though dangers lurk behind every corner; a car out of control, disease ever-present in the air, the unforgiving speed of time.”
New on the TBR
New books acquired (all of these came from the recent Two Lines Press sale):
The Interim by Wolfgang Hilbig, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole (2021, originally published in 2000): “C. is a wretched grump, an anguished patron of bars, brothels, and train stations. He is also an acclaimed East German writer. Dogged by writer's block, remorse, and national guilt in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he leaves the monochromatic existence of the GDR for the neon excess of the West.”
Mina by Kim Sagwa, translated by Bruce Fulton and Ju-Chan Fulton (2018): I really liked Kim Sagwa’s book b, Book, and Me, so I snatched up her earlier work: “Kim creates a piercingly real teen protagonist–at once powerful, vulnerable, and utterly confused.”
Bright by Duanwad Pimwana, translated by Mui Poopoksakul (2019): this is the first ever novel by a Thai woman to be translated into English! “When five-year-old Kampol is told by his father to wait for him in front of some run-down apartment buildings, the confused boy does as told--he waits, and waits, and waits, until he realizes his father isn't coming back anytime soon.”
Currently Reading
Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer (New Directions, 1999, originally published in 1982): right now is exactly when I should be reading this book, correct? It’s a book-length poem about a single day.
Nine Moons by Gabriela Wiener, translated by Jessica Powell (Restless Books, 2020, originally published in 2009): I recently finished and enjoyed this memoir about pregnancy. The author is a Peruvian woman living in Spain, and that perspective was fascinating. The writing is a little breezier than I prefer, so it’s not a favorite, but it’s a solid entry in the pregnancy/motherhood canon.
The Cormac Report
Now that we have discovered Cormac loves theater — and now that he’s vaccinated! — we’re fitting in as many shows as we can. Last weekend we saw the local high school production of A Christmas Carol, thoroughly enjoyed by all. The kid who played Scrooge was a real ham and very talented, so he was fun to watch. Cormac wasn’t familiar with the story, and I wondered how much he understood, particularly since the actors didn’t have mics and amateur actors aren’t always great at projecting, but he seemed to follow the story just fine. We talked a lot about which actor did the best job playing which ghost.
This weekend we’re trying something different: The Nutcracker. On to ballet!
Have a good rest of the week everyone!