August Blue is likely to be one of my favorite books of the year. It skirts the surreal on its slow and inevitable way to the wondrous. Every sentence went somewhere that felt both completely unexpected, and yet, absolutely inevitable. If you’ve read it, then you know what I’m talking about.

This is the first book by Deborah Levy that I’ve read and I’m sure is not going to be the last one. I fell in love with the story from the first page and couldn’t put it down. It is the story of a young talented woman in search of her own identity. She was considered a piano prodigy and that was enough for her to be able to build her self. But when she fails to deliver her best to the audience in a concert, her structure collapses and she has to rebuild her identity from scratch. Her teacher, mentor and adoptive father is the only one who knows her real origin but she never wanted to talk about it, until now.
Her new job as a teacher takes her to different Europeans city in a post pandemic world that is slowly returning to normalcy, so her inner exploration is also a pilgrimage.
The writing and the story are so polished that make this book a wonderfully absorbing reading.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Netgalley for this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

This is a slowly-paced, introspective novel following a famed violinist as she interrogates her relationships and upbringing following a career shifting performance.

With emotionally evocative prose, Levy paints a portrait of a young woman holding a mirror to herself as she traverses from job to job, country to country, minding that her "double" is always near.

This is a well written character study and would be of particular interest to readers familiar with classical music. I'm unfamiliar with the history and technicalities of piano, so many of the references went over my head. However, this did not deter me from following along with the story.

August Blue is for readers who prefer character driven narratives over fast-paced, plot heavy works. Despite the tedium at certain points in the narrative, I still liked this book.

It was such a pleasure to read August Blue early. This was my first Deborah Levy and I look forward to reading through her backlist, which I've long neglected. I devoured this book over the course of a weekend, but it also would benefit a slower, closer reading.

In August Blue, we meet our blue-haired narrator Elsa, who is an accomplished concert pianist suffering from a career setback. Rather than hiding away, Elsa spends a summer traveling around Europe and teaching teenagers piano, though the latter is really a minor plot point of the story. All the while, with the backdrop of the COVID pandemic in 2021, she grapples with her own mental health and the story of her upbringing.

One of the most fascinating parts of the book is Elsa's relationship, if it can even be called that, with her doppelgänger. She meets this young woman at a market in Athens, and quickly becomes obsessed with her. She continues to encounter her, both in real life (maybe?) and in her mind, where she uses her to talk through some of her inner conflicts. Whether or not this woman is real, she serves as a foil for Elsa as she grapples with her past.

August Blue felt like a combination of a Rachel Cusk and an Ali Smith novel. On the one hand, we get philosophical conversations between our narrator and her friends and acquaintances. On the other, August Blue is full of little Easter eggs that help to flesh out the themes of the story. While not explicitly, Levy encourages her reader to think about the references she places throughout the story and how they relate to the journey the characters are going on.

Overall, I loved this book. This is a book that demands a close read, exploring all of Levy's references and thinking more fully about her themes. At the same time, Levy gives us interesting characters and situations that I will definitely not forget.

In 1975, Eric Carmen used the second movement of Rachmaninov’s Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Opus 18 as the basis for his iconic tune All By Myself which could, in many ways, be the theme song for the main character Elsa M. Anderson in Deborah Levy’s August Blue.

The concerto is often described as the “greatest piano concerto ever written” and it’s worth sitting down to listen to it (it’s about 30 minutes long). It’s also the piece Elsa was playing on stage in Vienna when things started to go awry and she simply got up and walked off of the stage.

She now finds herself adrift, going from Greece to Paris to teach teenagers, and avoiding dealing with the fallout of what happened in Vienna. She’s also avoiding trying to understand her childhood and we come to learn that she lived with adoptive parents until, at age six, she went to live with famous music teacher Arthur who she feels nurtured her talent, but not the rest of her as she was raised by nannies and housekeepers.

Early in August Blue, Elsa sees a woman across a busy market square purchasing dancing toy horses. She is captivated and decides she wants the horses herself. The woman and the horses disappear before she can catch up to them but the woman has dropped her hat which Elsa takes. Over the course of the story, Elsa catches glimpses of the woman in the different countries she goes to and starts having conversations with the woman in her mind.

August Blue is set during the pandemic (think masks and rapid tests but past the lockdowns) and it certainly evoked the feeling of those times and yet, it’s not a huge part of the novel. But, along with the way Elsa seems to be floating solo through the world, haunted by her memories and a reappearing mystery woman, it does contribute to the dreamy feeling of the book.

I devoured August Blue in two days (it is short, just over 200 pages) and the only downside to that is that I wish I’d taken more time for side trips to listen to all the musical pieces that are referenced. Surely someone will or has made a playlist for this book. While very different, it reminded me of the feeling I had reading Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water and perhaps it’s no accident that both books reference music so widely. It also reminded me of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet. Levy plays her instrument–prose–beautifully, composing melodic prose and contrapuntal images. While this was my first Levy, it won’t be my last.

Thank you the publishers for an early e-copy.
This is my first Deborah Levy and certainly won't be my last. I have owned multiple of her other books but never read them, now I can't wait to jump in and read them as soon as possible. Levy's writing is something that very much surprised me; though it shouldn't.. as I have heard amazing things about Levy.
I loved so many things about this quick tiny book. From the various locations Elsa stays in to the quick and easy connection you feel for the characters in this novel. This is the story of a famous pianist who decides to "let go", to try to find herself, through another persona, through the many stays Europe and through her thoughts about a mother she has been looking for.
I very much recommend August Blue! I cant wait to read more of Levy's work now.

When Elsa sees her doppelgänger buying toy horses, she drops everything and takes off to follow her. She's a child prodigy who was more or less raised by her piano teacher but she had no real childhood or adolescence. This is an odd novel that packs a lot into a thin volume. It's not always clear where it's going but the language is beautiful, Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction.

This review is gonna be a weird one because my feelings about this book are oddly conflicting.

I can say that I enjoyed Levy's strange odyssey about a woman who encounters her double in Athens and begins engaging in some telepathy with her, as well as coming to terms with her own past and her relationship with her adoptive father/teacher Arthur.

Levy's writing is very clean and Hemingway-esque which is very dangerous territory for a writer to wade into in my opinion because it can go so wrong. Writing can become stilted, stiff, forced, or just plain awful. But she doesn't. It toes the line of being too simple and just descriptive enough to perfectly place the reader in a given scene or moment without leaving me confused or wanting more descriptions. I read this book in like two days because I was so fascinated by how Levy was going to wrap this story up. And I think she ended the book successfully but I think I'm feeling like I was wanting more of the book in terms of the plot and the unleashing of the conflict.

Thank you endlessly to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for allowing me to read this arc!!

Elsa M. Anderson, a world-renowned pianist in her thirties, gets up in the middle of a performance and walks off the stage.

In Athens, she sees a woman who seems to be – perhaps -- her doppelgänger buy a pair of mechanical dancing horses. Elsa wishes to also buy a pair, but there are no more. The woman who purchased the horses does, however, drop her trilby hat, which Elsa picks up and begins wearing.

Elsa travels Europe, meeting up with old friends and acquaintances, pausing a couple times to provide private lessons to children.

The key word here is “enigmatic” ... both in terms of Elsa and the other characters, but also in terms of the theme of this novel. She is trying to find the motif that can bring together the disparate parts of her life ... orphan, foster child, child prodigy, virtuoso pianist, and now a refugee of sorts.

If you are looking for a nice, clean storyline that has clearly defined characters and plot, this is not at all for you, but it is a fascinating read. I loved it.

“Blue was a separation from my DNA.”

“August Blue” follows a virtuoso pianist Elsa, who finds herself at a crossroads after a fiasco performance in Vienna. A Blue Period comes into Elsa’s life: she dyes her brown hair colour blue and sets off on a journey across Europe, haunted by the presence of a mysterious woman so much like herself, but slightly different - a double or a shadow.

Although this motif of a shadow or a double is not something new in literature or cinema, Deborah Levy explores it in an intriguing way. “August Blue” reads like a puzzle, a blue box in David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”. The narrative that has been built up for Elsa doesn’t feel right anymore. She experiences both individual and global crises - as she looks for her own self, her own identity, there is a sense that a kind of metamorphosis is bound to occur.

Elsa’s world is piano, so musical elements and references flow through this novel. Despite dedicating her life to Sergei Rachmaninoff, Frédéric Chopin, Erik Satie, Philip Glass and others, Elsa starts to wonder about performance and creation. Enchanted by the free movements of the modern choreographer Isadora Duncan, she starts to look for her own composition in music and life.

“After all, she had already been written by everyone else.”

There is something special about the colour blue:

“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.” - Rebecca Solnit, in “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”

Throughout history, this colour has been playing a very important role in art, literature and even everyday life. Many artists from those of Ancient Egypt till modern artists such as Yves Klein, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso have used blue in their work to represent or anti-represent a complex variety of themes and mood. Its variety of pigments and tones has never stopped from evolving - our relationship with blue demonstrates our relationship with the world.

When I saw the title of this story I was over the moon. Given that the colour blue is such powerful material with endless possibilities, I was expecting something truly astonishing. While I enjoyed how Levy used the colour blue in her novel, for example, with a juxtaposition of metamorphosis and the process of Elsa’s hair-dying, I wished Levy used this motif in a more extensive or creative way.

Besides the colour blue motif, there are some other themes with a big potential which Levy briefly touches upon, but they end up unattended in the background - in comparison to her “The Man Who Saw Everything”, which I read earlier this year, “August Blue” felt less cohesive. As much as I enjoyed some of Elsa’s (or Levy’s ) observations, they felt slightly out of place and sometimes I struggled to make a connection between those details and the big picture. On the other hand, a really intriguing aspect of this novel and probably Levy’s work - just like musical compositions aren’t answers but questions, Levy asks you a question, wants you to figure out her novel.

This is my second Levy - there is something really appealing about the effortless way Levy interweaves the mundane and the lyrical in her writing. While I didn’t find “August Blue” as engaging as “The Man Who Saw Everything”, I thought it was an interesting reading experience and I look forward to discovering her other works.

Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux who kindly provided me with an advanced reading copy via NetGalley.

3.5/5

All of Deborah Levy’s books are charming and odd, and this one was no exception. It follows Elsa, a famous pianist, as she travels Europe teaching kids after a disappointing concert performance of her own.

This is a very simple and quiet little novel. It's beautifully written, but it didn't leave a lasting impression on me. Deborah Levy is very good at writing emotional and gripping characters. I think the main problem I had was the lack of plot/direction this book takes. Not much happens, plot-wise. "August Blue" is a character- driven novel. Even though I liked getting into the psyche of the main character, I needed more plot which is why my rating is only 3 stars. Lovely writing, just not very memorable.

NetGalley ARC Educator 550974

A fascinating read that is more of a thriller and mind bender. Eva is a child prodigy that is helping her adoptive father during his last days and wondering about her birth mother. There are references that may go over am average reader's head, stay with it. I could see the film adaptation winning many awards.

Brilliant, emotionally complex tale of a neglected child prodigy adopted and raised by her music teacher, who achieves moderate success in her career and personal life at the cost of devoting herself to others’ expectations

This is really a 4.5 star book for me. Levy is in her Cusk era and I am into it. I found this so easy to read, I had to stop myself from fully devouring it in one sitting. Levy manages to create a full atmosphere with spare but thoughtful language. It’s honestly annoying how good she is. I also love that she makes the reader work by refusing to tie things up neatly.

Thanks to Net Galley, Deborah Levy and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A story of a famous pianist who chokes in a concert and then spends some time recovering and exploring other options. Along the way she sees what appears to be her double in several places. She has imaginary conversations with double that seem like a chance for personal exploration of her life and current status. From the description I expected this book to be weirder than it was. It was more about her inner struggles with her performance, her future, and her teacher/adopted father and the double is just a construct for exploring that. Fine writing, short novel, but not exciting.

I loved reading this original story about a 34-year-old pianist who walked out of a concert in Vienna. Elsa is a world-famous prodigy, adopted and mentored by an older man. Arthur was an influential piano teacher who saved Elsa from a foster family in England and taught and fathered her for many years. Elsa gives her biological mother much thought in the story. There is grief and longing on every page.

Elsa's character is one of mental torture, going almost as far as a mental breakdown. While in Athens (she agrees to teach piano lessons on an island for a weekend), Elsa sees a woman who she thinks is her doppelganger and, throughout her travel to Paris and back to England, continues to see this woman. It is a fast, lively novel weighed down with heavy notes of sadness going back to why her mother gave up the miracle child who could play piano at age six.

There was no easy ending to this fascinating tale of classical music and fame, leaving a young woman to wonder what it all meant then and how can she go forward in the future.

Whatever Deborah Levy writes, I'm there for it. There's something so atmospheric about her writing. It makes you think, while not being hard to absorb or a struggle to read. She knows how to build suspense to keep the pages turning.

This is the story of a prodigy, Elsa, who was raised by a man who was also her piano teacher after she was given up for adoption. Slowly, the reader gets to know Elsa better, her struggles with her piano career, and her relationships, both sexual and parental. Throughout the book, Elsa has a doppelganger, and she wonders who this woman is exactly. The storyline that focuses on Elsa's doppleganger is the symbolic heart of the book, which I found challenging to discern.

Like other Levy works, there's a hazy mysterious overlay that leaves the reader guessing a bit as to what is exactly going on. This strategy is so up my alley, but in prior books, I had a strong hypothesis at least of what the author meant to convey. In this book, I didn't feel quite as wowed by the ending because I didn't have this same feeling of conclusion. And when I re-read the initial chapter to see if I had missed any loose threads, I felt even less clear.

Fortunately, I didn't care all that much! It was still a very worthwhile READ, and I'd happily pick it up all over again. I appreciate works that make room for reader interpretation and speculation . . .to me, this is literature at its best. It's the type of work I want to discuss and dissect and speculate about . . .and from that perspective, Levy completely delivers.

Not my favorite Levy but I always enjoy her work! Philosophical, weird, European. I liked the twin metaphors and the sense of unease, Interesting meditation on longing and family.

A famed pianist walks off the stage to leave it all behind. Then someone begins to shadow her as the pianist works her way through Europe.
Who are we and who is our other self?

A fascinating premise.