Member Reviews
Deborah Levy writes across fiction and non fiction. sometimes, as with this book, close your eyes and you could be in either format. the themes are similar- a creative person goes to Paris and Greece in search of herself. Along the way she has fleeting but memorable relationships. She struggles with her craft and with herself.
the prose is delicious, sentences and paragraphs slip effortlessly into our minds.
Not my favourite DL (and she is amongst my favourite writers so its a high bar) but thoroughly enjoyable,
The story of Elsa, a famous young concert pianist who botches a big concert and then struggles with the aftermath and what it means for her identity as the world is dealing with the Covid pandemic. It is clear that this young woman is dealing with a traumatic event, and trying to unpick her confusing childhood origin story, but I found it very difficult to engage with her character and to feel any sort of investment in the arc of her story. She seems the same person at the beginning as at the end, deeply invested in her self, possibly paranoid, adrift, unsympathetic. I struggled a bit to finish this one, though it was very short.
“It occurred to me that what I had transmitted to her, across four countries, was pain. We were all striding out into the world once again to infect and be infected by each other. If she was my double and I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was foolish? The air was electric between us, the way we transmitted our feelings to each other as they flowed through our arms, which were touching. We agreed that whatever happened next in the world, we would still rub conditioner into our hair after we washed it and comb it through to the ends, we would soften our lips with rose-, strawberry-and cherryscented balm, and though we would be interested to see a wolf perched in a lonely mountain, we liked our household animals to betray their savage nature and live with us in our reality, which was not theirs. They would lie in our laps and let us stroke them through waves of virus, wars, drought and floods and we would try not to transmit our fear to them.”
August Blue begins in September*, during the pandemic. with the first-person narrator watching a woman at a market stall in Greece buying a mechanical horse (* see 1) below):
“I first saw her in a flea market in Athens buying two mechanical dancing horses.
...
She was wearing a black felt trilby hat. I couldn’t see much of her face because the blue clinical mask we were obliged to wear.at this time was stretched over her mouth and nose. Standing with her was an elderly man, perhaps eighty years old. He did not respond to the horses with delight, as she was doing. Her body was animated, tall and lively as she pulled the strings upwards and outwards. Her companion was still, stooped and silent.
...
She seemed to be about my age, thirty-four, and like me she was wearing a tightly belted green raincoat. It was almost identical to mine, except hers had three gold buttons sewn on to the cuffs. We obviously wanted the same things. My startling thought at that moment was that she and I were the same person. She was me and I was her. Perhaps she was a little more than I was. I sensed she had known I was standing nearby and that she was taunting me.”
Elsa approaches the stall to attempt to buy a similar pair of horses, only to find they were the last pair. She goes it pursuit of the woman, failing to find her, but finding her trilby hat, which Elsa promptly wears herself, reasoning that she has the woman's hat and the woman has the horses she wants, so perhaps they can swap at some stage.
The narrator, Elsa, a famous English concert pianist, then introduces herself to us by what her friends know about her (which suggests there may be other things she isn't telling them, or us):
“They knew I was a child prodigy and they knew how my foster-parents gifted me, age six, to Arthur Goldstein, who adopted me so I could become a resident pupil at his music school. I had been moved from a humble house near Ipswich in Suffolk to a grander house in Richmond, London. They knew about my audition and then scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, they knew about the international prizes and Carnegie Hall, the recordings of recital work and piano concertos under the baton of the greatest conductors, most recently, and fatally, in the Golden Hall in Vienna. They knew about my acclaimed interpretations of Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Ravel, Schumann, and they knew I had lost my nerve and was making mistakes. They knew I was now thirty-four. No lovers. No children.”
The "fatal" concert in Vienna, a performance of Rachmaninov, accompanied by an orchestra took place the previous month. Before then her identity seemed to becoming unmoored:
“A week before the Rachmaninov concert I had decided to dye my hair blue. Arthur tried to dissuade me. After all, my long brown hair, always plaited and coiled around my head, was my signature look. Elsa M. Anderson, the piano virtuoso who in some ways resembled a prima ballerina.”
The concert itself was to end in farce, when Elsa found herself incapable (mentally, not technically) of playing the 'Rach' piece and played her own composition instead while the orchestra ploughed on with the original. Elsa has now stopped playing the piano professionally, instead teaching piano privately to the children of the internationally well-off, and Arthur, her teacher and mentor, has moved to his Sardinian second home, where her friends joke he perhaps has a lover:
“They had meant it as a joke because he was now eighty. I never knew anything about his romantic life. I had not once seen Arthur with a partner, though I suspected he had his own arrangements. He was forty-six when he adopted me, so maybe the most inflamed parts of his libido had been tamed.”
That's all in the opening pages of the novel - but the attentive reader of the above paragraph will immediately notice something is off (see 2) below).
Elsa is in Greece for one such set of lessons and in the novel she returns to England, then goes to Paris for another such series of lessons, back to England and then to Sardinia to visit the ailing Arthur, the story taking place over a year until the following August. Throughout it all Elsa wears the trilby hat, and keeps encountering, or thinks she encounters, the woman, her double. And she wrestles with what happened in the Viennese concert and also her own identity, including that of her birth mother, of which she has hitherto been uncurious.
The lessons of Levy's previous novel The Man Who Saw Everything is that what seemed like continuity errors were actually deliberate (if not necessarily explained) on the author's behalf, and this novel left me with a number of such questions, including:
1) Elsa's Covid vaccine
I believe the novel starts in September 2021, rather than September 2020, given the various aspects of the Covid timeline, although one could make a case for either. But Elsa receives her first Covid vaccine in France in November, with the pharmacist commenting that “we will make a little piece of history”. The first vaccinations in France, of the elderly, took place in late December 2020 (other than trials) but by November 2021, vaccination was routine, most of the UK population would have been double-vaccinated and the booster campaign was beginning.
2) the mystery of Arthur's age
Elsa is adopted by Arthur when she is 6 and she is now 34. He was 46 when he adopted her. That makes him around 74 now. But on three separate times (and by Elsa, and another character) we are told Arthur is 80, so he has aged 34 years while she has aged 28.
To add to the sense this is deliberate that he is 80 is mentioned three separate times (“he’s very fit for a man of eighty” Elsa tells someone in London, and “Arthur looked after you since you were a child and now he is eighty” is played back to her by Arthur's companion in Sardinia), so that the reader cannot really miss the anomaly. But them Elsa also tells another friend, almost gratuitously, “He was born in 1946 after all”, which is instead consistent with the correct age.
And connecting both of the above there is a sense of time slippage in the novel associated with the three time zones of GMT (Lond0n), GMT+1 (Paris, Sardinia) and GMT+2 (Greece):
“For some reason my laptop would not let me change UK time to Greek time, so I had to keep adding two hours to British time. If it was five in the afternoon in Poros, it was seven in the evening in London. This bending of time, backwards and forwards, added to the unreality of being in Greece after the long lockdown.”
3) the novel's title, August Blue.
Elsa died her hair blue in a concert in August - hence August blue. But Levy would be aware of other resonances so what is the connection with the poem The Sundew by Algernon Charles Swinburne and the associated painting August Blue by Henry Scott Tuke?
4) the link to Frozen
If you call a character, who has lost her birth parents, Elsa and associate her with the colour blue, then you must be making a nod to the greatest movie of the 21st century. But what does Levy want us to take from this - was the 'fatal' concert Elsa letting it go?
5) the novel's epigraph "Even our shadows are in love when we walk"
This is taken from the closing words of My Mother Laughs, Daniella Shreir's translation of Chantal Akerman's original Ma mère rit (disappointingly the translator isn't credited in the novel), which records the decline of the film director's mother.
But who is the reference to in the context of this novel - Elsa and her doppelganger, Elsa and Arthur, her near life-long companion, or Elsa and her unknown (to her) birth mother? The previous line in My Mother Laughs reads, “We loved each other, we went our separate ways, I don't remember why, and now we love each other”, and on Akerman's book, in the words of The Arts Desk "Although the book is an elegy for her mother, it is Akerman’s own obituary.".
Overall, this is an intriguing work, but I was left with more questions than answers. And while beautiful at the sentence level, the final confrontation between Elsa and the double was rather anti-climatic.
3.5 stars rounded to 3 for now but I can see this becoming 4 or more as the novel is published and other readers (and interviews with the author) fill in some of the gaps.
August Blue is about Elsa, a talented musician who one day in a market sees someone who she thinks is her double and then she becomes obsessed. Elsa is having issues with her identity.
I recently read Deborah Levy's The Man Who Saw Everything and I loved it. This new book might seem different from her popular Swimming Home and Hot Milk but still is mesmerising.
<i>How do we know what we know?</i>
I think this is honestly the best Deborah Levy novel I've read so far??? Yes, better than <i>Swimming Home</i> and <i>Hot Milk.</i> I think she is an absolute GENIUS. Such a pleasure to read on the level of a sentence and yet also such a well-told, satisfying story. I had no idea what this book was about so I recommend reading as little about it as possible because its unexpected directions provided a lot of readerly pleasure for me. I SOOO admire the way she uses echoes, repetition, and parallel images - the resonance of a pair of horses is particularly key. As is the theme of the double. And I loved the subtext of characters wearing masks. The sensual sensory details, the killer one liners.... it's all just incredibly readable in terms of storytelling, and also beautifully complex in terms of language, theme, and imagery. LOVED IT. Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.
<i>We agreed that whatever happened next in the world, we would still rub conditioner into our hair after we washed it and comb it through to the ends, we would soften our lips with rose-, strawberry- and cherryscented balm.
We were all striding out into the world once again to infect and be infected by each other.
The obligation to keep the life drive going strong when death is our ultimate destiny.
Think of all the beautiful things you can do now, he whispered.
It was a shock to weep so loudly through a commercial for fabric softener.
I became neurotic at twenty when I started to drink avocado smoothies and tried to only think positive thoughts.
What I really missed in the lockdowns was buying a coffee. Sipping a flat white. If my identity is so fragile it depends on a flat white to keep it together, I can't see the point of those years I've spent reading difficult theory and philosophy. Capitalism sold a flat white to me as if it were a cup of freedom.
I did not want to plunge a fork into my life and look at it too closely.
I was still in love with Isadora's bare feet and arms. It was a way to be in the world. Upwards and outwards.</i>
A strange and dreamy narrative, this is not one of lovers of a propulsive plot, but if you’re prepared to be swept up in Levy’s glorious writing it’s a pleasure.
Well, as they say there is a lot to unpick here - but I am slightly concerned that if I unpick it too much there will be a jumble of randomness, not completely dissimilar to the original text.
There is a main character, I didn’t feel emotionally tied to her and she seemed to be experiencing some form of paranoia but it is all very unclear. She has a number of random teaching assignments which didn’t add much to the plot.
Suddenly towards the end there is an emphasis on her not quite adoptive father and the identity of her mother. I was waiting the big satisfying reveal but it was more of a damp murmur.
All very odd.
Elsa was a child prodigy who is “gifted” to a maestro who becomes her mentor.
Elsa is in Athens and sees someone who she thinks is her double buying mechanical dancing horses. Elsa becomes obsessed with the woman and sees her as she moves through London, Paris and back to Greece.
Some overly writing. According to the publishers this is “a story of split selves, wayward selves, feminities sexualities, avatars, shadows, reflections, alter egos and the twin poles of compassion and cruelty that exist within all of us.” Maybe so but it didn’t come together for me.
Also, the tomatillos that I have had have been small and green:
“He mostly existed on cheese-flavoured crisps until we discovered the hotel staff served a tomatillo for breakfast every morning. Shaped like a large egg, its taste was sweet and sour, invigorating, maybe similar to a passion fruit. “
Thanks to the publisher for an ARC via Netgallery.
August Blue by Deborah Levy is about a woman struggling with her career as a talented pianist and with her identity and sense of self having been raised by her teacher who is now elderly and dying. The way Levy writes is so effective and effortless and full of perfect details.
As much as I love Levy's writing and her outstanding 'living autobiography' volumes, I struggled somewhat with this. As usual, there's much of interest here, not least the fact that the central character is a famous pianist - but it's hard to see how the vision of the book coheres. There's doubling and shadowing, something that literature has been dealing with forever though here it's not a Gothic doppelganger sort of mirroring, and is something more opaque. I was left by the end as puzzled as I was entertained - but I miss the more direct and funny Levy from the memoirs.