Having read the earlier books in Levy's series of memoir, I continued to be impressed. There is something to be said for the way in which Levy utilises time in her prose: it is fluid, so we will stop in one moment as the author is reminded of something from the past that relates to the story that she wishes to tell. It is seamlessly done and I was in awe of her craft.

I love the way Deborah Levy writes and this was no exception.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC in return for an honest and unbiased opinion.

Just perfection. Deborah Levy is a master of the written word. It's an absolute delight to read her intimate memoirs - very moving, too.

Deborah Levy is one of my favourite authors. I would read the telephone directory as rendered by her - it would reveal unexpected aspects to everyday living.

Amazing! Finishing the autobiography series by Deborah Levy makes me a bit sad. I'll be re-reading Cost of living many times.
(PS: Completely forgot about updating feedback on Netgalley.)

I was sent a copy of Real Estate by Deborah Levy to read and review by NetGalley. This is the third in the series of Deborah Levy’s memoirs and like the others it gives snippets of insights into the author’s life and mind. I really enjoyed this book but like the others I wished that the quotes from other writers were set in a different font indicating that this was the case as I found myself having to go back to see where the quote started once I had seen the reference for it. I was also a little dismayed at the fact that a couple of other novels were cited including their outcomes – I hadn’t read these particular books and now perhaps I won’t! Regardless of these niggles it is a well written and quite thought provoking read and I do hope that even though it is listed as the final instalment there will be more in the future.

Real Estate by Deborah Levy is an honest, candid, but still fiercely feminist work in which she allows the reader to see a certain vulnerability as her youngest daughter prepares to leave for university and she considers a new phase of her life.

Levy is making and revising her checklist of things that her new house should have when she finally gets around to finding it - what she refers to as her 'unreal estate'.

We get a glimpse of items that she holds dear and places she has lived and most importantly the friends that has. The decisions that her 'best male friend' makes could see him forsaking that title that Levy has given him.

I thoroughly enjoyed this latest (and hopefully not the last installment of Levy's autobiography) as her writing style appears effortlessly clever yet full of conviction.

At one point in this book the author includes a quote from Marguerite Duras, the gist of which is that she considered most books to be too organised, too prim and as a result lacked the true voice of the author. Well, I think Levy has taken this to heart in her production of this, the third volume of her memoirs. Whilst not a loose stream of consciousness rant – it feels more structured than that - it’s certainly a monologue that attempts to capture her true thoughts, feelings and wishes as she approaches and passes her sixtieth birthday.

Her youngest daughter is about to leave the flat they’d shared in North London to attend university in the North East of England. Levy will be thereafter be living alone for the first time in many years. Does she want to continue to live in this flat, with it crumbling, decrepit corridors? No, she wants a house close to water so she can swim every day and has one or two specific ideas regarding what she’d have in the house. But then she has a rather broader view of real estate than most: it comprises everything that she values, including a plant considered by her two daughters to be their mother’s third child. And so for much of this book the background narrative is that of her considered thoughts on exactly what is (and what it isn’t) she wants in her life from this point on.

In the few years covered in this book, Levy ruminates on the challenges of writing, spends time in New York, Berlin, Paris and Greece and reveals just how much she misses her late mum. But there’s more than that, she has many wry and interesting observations on life – many from what I’d consider left field – and uses quotes from a wide range literary sources to help illustrate her points. On the matter of acquiring a future life partner she muses that there is nobody that can make you happy, you must take care of yourself.

It’s a thought provoking and in many ways illuminating book, a short read which carries a significant punch. I’ve enjoyed working through these three volumes and it does make me feel like revisiting some of her novels that I’ve previously read – this time with fresh and probably more informed eyes.

I love Levy's writing and this one did not disappoint. I have loved reading her memoirs. Thank you Netgalley for the copy.

This is the second of Deborah Levy’s “living autobiographies” I’ve read, and while I didn’t love it quite as much as The Cost of Living (probably because that one had more personal resonance), I still absolutely savoured it. I love the way Levy writes and I love the concept of a living autobiography. I hope she writes many more.

“I began to wonder what I and all the women missing their own desires and all the rewritten women … would possess in property portfolios at the end of our lives. … What do we value (though it might not be societally valued), what might we own, discard and bequeath?”

My thanks to Penguin U.K. for the invitation to review a digital copy via NetGalley of ‘Real Estate’ by Deborah Levy.

This is the third in Levy’s three part Living Autobiography. I have become familiar now with Levy’s stream-of-consciousness lyrical style that informs these memoirs.

As she approaches her 60th birthday Levy is looking for something more than a room of her own. She longs for a house and considers her existing property portfolio: “I owned a flat in my crumbling apartment block, three e-bikes and three wooden fairground horses.” She also references a portfolio of unreal estate made up of an imagined home based on various places she has visited such as Georgia O’Keefe’s renovated adobe in New Mexico.

Throughout all three books her writing is excellent as she both reflects upon her personal experience and the broader experiences of women in modern society.

Her account of a visit to Silencio, a semi-private club in Paris, proved a ‘aha’ moment for me: “Every room was designed by David Lynch, one of the film directors who had most inspired my approach to fiction.” This link with Lynch increased my understanding of her writing, that certainly has elements of the surreal.

She also writes about the creation of characters, major and minor, likeable and unlikeable, and being a character in her own life.

Overall, I found Levy’s memoir intelligent, moving, insightful and witty.

The third in Deborah Levy's autobiographical trilogy, Real Estate is perfection. If you loved the first two books, this is more of the same. If you've never read the others, you could still read this and find it richly fulfilling. A book about what it is to be a woman writing to find herself and finding ways to live to write and vice versa. Full of charm, humour, poignancy and a stellar eye for the absurd. I didn't want any of these books to end.

Real Estate is the third book in Deborah Levy’s ‘living autobiography’ trilogy. In this book the author postulates the true meaning of ‘real estate’. An enjoyable read.

This book completes the trilogy of the author’s memoirs. As much of a treat as the first two and left me with a real sadness that I’d finished my voyage into her life. It’s beautifully written. I love the author’s gentle way of telling her story and sharing her adventures and events both happy and sad. A real joy to read and I would totally recommend it (along with the first two) as an excellent and enjoyable read.

"I own the books that I have written and bequeath the royalties to my daughters. In this sense, my books are my real estate. They are not private property. There are no fierce dogs or security guards at the gate and there are no signs forbidding anyone to dive, splash, kiss, fail, feel fury or fear or be tender or tearful, to fall in love with the wrong person, go mad, become famous or play on the grass."

This is the third volume in Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography series (after “Things I Don’t Want to Know” and “The Cost of Living”), this was published in 2021, two years after her Booker longlisting for “The Man Who Saw Everything”.

The book opens in London in January 2018. The author is approaching sixty and over the last few years has gained a degree of (in modern literary writing terms) commercial success, but it still conscious that compared to writers of previous generations (some of whom bought large houses from their success) or some of her contemporaries (with paid off mortgages and second homes) she lacks a grand old house of her own where she can live and work and write. Instead she builds the house both in her imagination and by starting to accumulate possessions for it. At the same time he real flat is about to become a one person home as her younger daughter sets out for university.

She also reflects on how females – both characters in books and real women, particularly married with children, are in effect written out of their own story – this in turn leads her to reflect on whether women are “real estate owned by the patriarchy”.

And these two themes around different types of real estate interleave throughout the book (whose chapters are set in different cities – London, New York, Paris, Greece, Mumbai, Berlin) giving it perhaps more of a coherence of theme than the first two novels, even while at the same time it has much of the same writing style and underlying themes (motherhood, femininity, the patriarchy, the writing life) and a developing group of characters from the second volume.

Each of the volumes in the trilogy follows two years after one of Levy’s novels and there are links and references in the previous volumes to the relevant novel – but the links to “The Man Who Saw Everything” are much more extensive and explicit here – which I particularly enjoyed as it is my favourite of Levy’s novel and one I read and re-read and discussed at length with Goodreads friends.

"When it became clearer to me that the main male character in The Man Who Saw Everything was going to live simultaneously in different points in time, I found that it was so technically hard to melt time in a work of literature, I had to write in all time zones.

To work is to live without dying. Rilke

I was creating a male character who literally was trying to find a way of living without dying. He was running out of time. There were spectres, historical and personal, coming out to play in what remained of his life. He himself would become a spectre three seconds after the very last line in the book. There were spectres in the shadows of my own life too: childhood, Africa, love, loneliness, ageing, my mother, all the unreal estate in my property portfolio."

A wonderful end to an outstanding trilogy.

What sorcery is this? What should on the surface of things be a boring set of self-centred musings of a middle-aged woman in search of material satisfaction is instead an unputdownable compendium of essays. Bewitching.

"They wanted to know how I set about constructing a voice for the narrator, who is myself but not quite myself. I told them I reckoned the narrator had to do something that is tricky in life, never mind in a book. She must not make herself too big or too small. That is to say, she must not constantly undermine herself in order to beg readers to like her, nor must she make herself grander on the page than she actually is in life. It is hard to claim fragility and strength in equal measure..."

Really loved this book - Deborah Levy is one of my favourite writers, I love how she manages to be both profound and witty within the space of a paragraph. This series of autobiographies from Levy has been beautiful and I've loved following her life. Real Estate explores the idea of home and relationships, there were so many passages I wanted to highlight and note down.

I had heard good things about this and had enjoyed Deborah’s writing style in the past. I was disappointed by this, I still liked the writing style but couldn’t get into it. I wasn’t able to finish it, without it feeling like a chore.

I loved the previous two books in this series of memoirs by Levy and Real Estate lived up to my high expectations. Levy is her usual brilliant self and no doubt this will sell as well as usual.

Didn’t click with this one, didn’t realise it was the third part in a series so I think this contributed to the fact that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I expected to. It ended very suddenly too, so just very confused by this book.