The latest in Deborah Levy's living memoir series does not disappoint. Levy is a skilled observer of both others and her own mind. Meditations on motherhood, the role of older women in literature and films and her own writing sing throughout her considered prose. The vision of Levy's ideal Real Estate hovers throughout as she navigates her writing life through London, Paris and Berlin.

DNF at 40%. This just isn't for me. I shouldn't have requested this book, but I have been meaning to try Deborah Levy's work for a while. The final installment of an autobiographical trio was not the best place to start. However, I still look forward to picking up 'Hot Milk' in the future.

Thank you NetGalley and Penguin for the free copy in exchange for an honest review.

At a time when we are grounded to our own small plot of earth, to read Deborah Levy’s word felt like I was soaring above the sky. London, New York, Mumbai, Paris, Greece.. to walk and swim in these places felt such a relief. I could taste the sweet sugar that coats the air in Paris and the salt on my tongue in Greece. I imagine the warmth from the sun penetrating my bones and I sit on the edge of the screen watching her life unfurl.
There is something so comforting in her writing. I always feel like I’m reading a letter from an dear friend or relative. On considering her relationship with places, friends, houses, family, objects and fleeting acquaintances she manages to make this book team with the fullest of lives. As she unravels her life on the page, I feel I can see mine more clearly. I feel like her banana plant, well watered by her words.
This is the best of books, the ones that have that magic that whispers something to your soul even if your don’t know quite what that is.

A thoroughly enjoyable conclusion to Deborah Levy’s autobiographical trilogy - thanks for giving me the chance to read!

In the couple of days before I read Real Estate, I took the time to re-visit the first two parts of Levy’s Living Autobiography (“Things I Don’t Want To Know” and “The Cost Of Living”). If, like me, you are a fan of Levy’s writing, these three books are a wonderful collection. Each one could be read separately, but they all build on some similar themes and work well together as a set. In each one, we spend time with Levy in a particular period in her life.

Here, we follow Levy as she approaches her sixtieth birthday. She is at a stage in life where her marriage has broken down and now her two daughters are moving into adult life and leaving home, so she suddenly finds herself contemplating living on her own for the first time in many, many years. She begins to long for a new home (new real estate), she is "collecting things for a parallel life, or a life not yet lived, a life that was waiting to be made”.

I love the passages where Levy lets rip. For instance, this on the book’s title when she imagines having a housekeeper in her dream house and the life she will live. Her housekeeper says:

"Your soup is ready. I have fed your wolves and prepared the smoking pipe with your desired brand of tobacco. By the way, madame (my housekeeper’s lips were stained from the raspberries they had devoured for lunch), I note you are thinking about Real Estate. The word ‘Real’ derives from the Latin word ‘Rex’, meaning royal. ‘Real’ also means ‘king’ in Spanish, because kings used to own all the land in their kingdoms. For Lacan, the Real is everything that cannot be said. It has nothing to do with reality. Is there anything else you require before I run my bath and listen to Lana del Rey?"

In this period of her life, we move with Levy from London to New York to London to Mumbai to London to Paris to Berlin to Paris to London to Greece. There’s the narrative of a life being lived (it IS an autobiography, after all) but it is surrounded by Levy’s thoughts on motherhood, ageing, parenthood, writing, creativity and patriarchy (plus others). These are themes that run through all three books.

One of the things I love about reading these books is the way an episode in her life will remind Levy of something or make her think about a specific topic but then that idea will join with all the others floating around in the book and become another motif that she can pluck out of the air 50 pages later then again, then again, then again but mixed with another idea and then again mixed with other ideas. All this makes the whole thing a delight to read.

The other thing that makes this book (in fact, all three books) so much fun for Levy fans is the insights into her writing. In the first two books, we learned quite a bit about Swimming Home and Hot Milk. Here, there is more focus on The Man Who Saw Everything., so we read comments like

"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…"

And we learn about the inspiration for the ylang-ylang fragrance that plays a significant role in that book.

I could write a lot more about this book. I highlighted literally dozens of quotes, some for their beauty (e.g. "Can we accept that writing is sacred and scared and it’s scarred as well…"), some for their observations (this on the birth of Athena: "Their daughter, Athena, the girl child, springs from his head dressed in full armour, defended and ready for war. That was the patriarchal script written for Athena. It is a sad way to be born: armoured and ready for war.") and some for the possible explanations of some of the reasons why I like Levy’s writing so much (this on the nightclub Silencio: "Every room was designed by David Lynch, one of the film directors who had most inspired my approach to fiction").

My thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley of this wonderful book.

Real Estate, the third in Deborah Levy's series of "living autobiographies", is as good as anything (and everything) that she has written. It is a series of reflections on her probably unrealisable desire for a new home as she moves between London, Paris, Berlin and Hydra, "collecting things for a parallel life, or a life not yet lived, a life that was waiting to be made". As such, it's hard to describe but it offers all kinds of fascinating observations on writing, creativity, ageing and parenting. However, the quixotic search for a new home is not really the subject of the book, especially for someone so good at travelling, something which is likely to prompt longing among readers restricted by the pandemic. It seems much more about writing itself as home and a source of freedom: "I supposed that what I most value are real human relations and imagination [...] my books are my real estate. They are not private property." I hope she writes plenty more.

Real Estate by Deborah Levy is an insightful memoir about being a woman, a mother, a writer and about home.

4.5

'It seemed to me all over again that in every phase of living we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves.'

While reading the latest part of Deborah Levy’s excellent continuing memoir, Real Estate, I kept thinking, as is usually the case when I read Levy (two dozen or so other writers have a similar effect; Geoff Dyer, Nicola Barker, Alan Bennett, Muriel Spark amongst them) that to a large extent I don't mind what Levy wants to discuss or consider and that what I’m really here for, what compels me to turn the pages, is not the incident, narrative concerns or even the fact that I’m genuinely interested in such a fascinating individual’s life – however artfully arranged – but the voice the author has found with which she can talk about her life and her place in it.

Why, though, is Levy’s voice compelling?

Firstly, like all great authorial voices, it’s brilliantly synthesised. It seamlessly marries a philosophical interiority with the universal. So when Levy references Simone de Beauvoir, or Georges Perec, or Lady Gaga, or whoever she wants to employ as a reinforcing element as part of any of her pleasing pop-culture riffs, she does so in an apparently offhand way, while engaging in some kind of prosaic interlude (buying shoes or chairs; boarding a train; cooking a meal) which both collapses the gravity of the cultural reference while elevating the personal act, fusing both in a way that accurately captures ‘real time’ conscious thought (Ali Smith does something very similar). It’s a complicated style which renders (or rescues) throwaway things by conferring upon them the same status as everything else, while making of supposedly lofty things merely a collection of utility symbols with which we might make more sense of existence, belonging to nobody, accessible to all, applicable to whatever takes our fancy.

So while we listen to Levy talk about her crumbling apartment, her ideal home (which exists in her mind and therefore exists for real -- she wants to protect mental spaces and dreams from, above all else, men), her daughters heading off to university or the concierge in her new flat in Paris, and wait for her next insertion of some long-held excerpt or aphorism that might suit a specific moment, we enjoy the contrived elegance of the unfettered raconteur, in a way we absolutely could not in any other way but on the page. The artifice implicit when grafting other people's words onto her own vanishes, since it’s seamlessly apt, affords contributions from sage outsiders no special deference and because she's bold enough to consider herself their equal, and the result is a beautifully working sense of someone both earthbound and ethereal, forced to deal with all kinds of things she’d often rather not, but also revivifying them with a well-deployed juxtaposition and by refusing to accept pretty much all received value systems. All of which makes much more of typewriters and taxi journeys as part of a unifying tapestry.

(Another way of putting this is to say that Levy seems to find the world more fascinating than lovable. While collecting these scenes, I wonder if she enjoys them even nearly as much as she does after the fact, when she can make them her own.)

Secondly, Levy knows that time is a very different matter to the contemplative mind than it is out in the world, and that this compounds the suggestion that everything is inherently interconnected (or that any mind hoping to make sense of a world has to impose such a system), a suggestion that’s crucial to the success of such a style. Showing that this is the case is partly down to the synthesis on a sentence and paragraph level, but also due to her refusal to separate childhood with adulthood (other than parts of an extended and finally condensed sequence), ephemera with the eternal, dream houses with real ones. She works at layering together the strands of a life so that we can better appreciate the constant peculiarity and wonder of day-to-day life (which is at first negotiated and then, later, perhaps years later, finally experienced, or even subject to a constant state of incompletion).

Real Estate makes an infectious, compelling case for building a life at all costs, rather than accepting a much easier, externally created, implicitly dishonest idea of existence. Because Deborah Levy seems very much to be living much more than most people (often with difficulty and moments of doubt and loneliness), and honouring a version of herself she can accept as opposed to manage, this working commentary is never just a matter of information or discovery: it's a manifesto for accepting and even revelling in change and taking zero BS.


Thank you to NetGalley for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Another excellent installment in her 'Living biography' series (the final volume). In my opinion Deborah Levy -together with Ali Smith- is definitely one of best writers at this moment. She's just unable to write a bad book. 'Real Estate' is absolutely brilliant and I enjoyed it enormously!
Thank you Penguin and Netgalley for the ARC.