I find Deborah Levy to be one of the most fascinating experimental writers working today; I place her on my short-list of absolute favorites, right beside Ali Smith. August Blue, the (forthcoming) newest of Deborah Levy’s novels, is—like most of her work—something of an infinity mirror reflecting the author’s longtime interests and themes: doubling, identity, echoes, feminism, sexuality, parenting, time slippage, and travel in all its aspects.

Here, Elsa M. (for Miracle?) Anderson, known in her childhood as Ann, once a child prodigy and now a famous concert pianist is at a crossroads. After years of success and fame, she has recently given a disastrous concert in Vienna, when while playing a piece that she has often performed, Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2, she loses her nerve and is unable to play the piece. This has become a very public failure.

During the course of the novel, Elsa travels to Greece, Italy, England, and France and encounters a number of people, real and perhaps imagined. She grapples with her pain, her history and her memories. The novel tracks Elsa’s movement from fragmentation, albeit within a very disciplined life, towards a more complicated integrality.

The novel opens at a flea market in Athens. Elsa, who is on her way to provide private piano lessons to a teenager living on the island of Poros, encounters a woman who purchases two mechanical dancing horses, which Elsa believes should belong to her instead; the woman drops her hat and Elsa picks it up and begins to wear it constantly. Although the two women do not speak, they recognize one another, and the encounter sets into place one of the central relationships of the novel. The two women are deeply linked, and Elsa will find that her doppelgänger pops up a number of times in the coming weeks; Elsa will also experience ongoing internal dialogues with her. The character becomes an alter ego that Elsa in her isolation can engage with. Whether this character represents a live person or not, or whether she is at times real and at times imagined, is not important to this novel (as, of course, it should not really be to the reader, who must accept that “reality” is not ever possible within the pages of any fiction), but instead, the focus of interest are the memories, dreams, and interactions that involve the two women.

Another important relationship for Elsa is with her mentor, teacher, and adoptive father, Arthur, who is in his final months of life in a house in Sardinia. Arthur holds the key to Elsa’s parentage and childhood. She is both drawn towards and terrified of finding out who her mother was. As a child prodigy, Elsa was taken from her foster parents and she has no memories of any earlier life; now, as part of her process, she must open the doors to some of her earliest memories. Along the way, she encounters a number of complicated parent/child relationships. She ends up teaching piano lessons to two teenagers, both of whom are grappling with their own growing up and managing expectations of their own complicated parents. These stories too become part of the echoing aspects of Elsa’s experiences.

Music is a central aspect of this novel, and has been the focus of Elsa’s life up to this point. Elsa’s connection with Rachmaninov, who she refers to as Rach, creates more opportunities for doubling. “Although we lived in different centuries, both Rach and I were popular soloists at a young age, giving concerts at various conservatories.” The concerto that becomes impossible for her to play in Vienna—not coincidentally, a piece written at the depth of Rachmaninov’s despair—itself becomes a central conversation in the novel. (Although it was not explicitly mentioned, I realized that yet another echo is that the melody of the pop song “All by Myself” made popular by Eric Carmen and later Celine Dion came directly from Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2.)

Several chapters into the novel, Elsa is able to revisit the concerto, and plays it on an out-of-tune Yamaha in the London St. Pancras train station for a gathering crowd of commuters: “I let Rach confide in me again.” After she plays, she is given flowers by a stranger, yet another double, here a woman also named “Ann, without an e” (Elsa’s childhood name) who tells her that “the Rachmaninov had moved her beyond…it had even made her forget she was alive.”

It is in music that Elsa is best able to access her deeper selves, but she also realizes that she needs to move beyond leaning on the emotions that she borrows from the work of the greats: “It is so abject to express this loneliness within me. I am not sure I can take the freedom to find a language in music to reveal it. I have, after all, learned to conceal it. The old masters are my shield. Beethoven. Bach. Rachmaninov. Schumann. Their inner lives are valuable without measure.”

By the end of the novel, we begin to see Elsa resolve some of her fears and reach for her own uncertain selves. The suggestion is made that tentative steps may be opening up opportunities for a more authentic future, with perhaps further creative leaps towards developing her own voice. This idea is reinforced when a woman that had been in attendance at the Vienna concert tells her of the excitement that she felt hearing her go off script: “It is true that we lost Rachmaninov’s second concerto for piano, she said, but for two minutes and twelve seconds we listened to Elsa M. Anderson play something that made us stop breathing.”

I found this novel to be absolutely breathtaking. My thanks to the book's American publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley for an opportunity to read an ARC of the book.

My first Deborah Levy and definitely won't be my last.

August Blue was haunting in many ways, but not in a frightening way. Instead, it pulled the reader along and made you feel as if you were floating: through the air, through city streets, through the Mediterranean sea... You're just sort of carried along, as you would be through a dream. You never feel like your feet are on solid ground save for a few moments here or there, but you find you don't actually mind.

This is a very internalized story, so if you're looking for tons of plot and momentum, it's not for you. However, if you're content to sit quietly and simply absorb what's going on around you, you'll really love this. I certainly did.

Thanks to NetGalley as usual for the early read!

August Blue by Deborah Levy follows Elsa M. Anderson is a classical piano virtuoso. In a flea market in Athens, she watches an enigmatic woman buy two mechanical dancing horses. Is it possible that the woman who is so enchanted with the horses is her living double? Is she also looking for reasons to live? Chasing their doubles across Europe, the two women grapple with their conceptions of the world and each other, culminating in a final encounter in a fateful summer rainstorm.

This book had all of the elements in books I love: no real plot just vibes, character study, European setting, short, no quotation marks for dialogues, and discussions of sexuality and individuality. However, this book just left me feeling confused and dumb. I'm not sure if this book was too smart for me, I'm just too dumb for it, or a combination of both. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy this one.

I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

deborah levy is such an artist. every book i have read of hers has so much depth and character is such a small amount of pages. i have never read such a short book that felt so layered and heart grabbing. i will read anything deborah levy ever publishes, i find myself unable to stop reading, and before i know it i’m done and i want more and more.

I absolutely loved reading this book. I was completely drawn into the topic and could not stop reading it.

A NEW DEBORAH LEVY!!!! I don't know how she does it, but AUGUST BLUE feels just as invigorating and hypnotic as any of Levy's past books. In terms of DNA, it is probably most similar to THE MAN WHO SAW EVERYTHING and HOT MILK. The story is deceptively straightforward. A world-renowned pianist sees her double (or does she?), and haphazardly pursues this other woman. At the same time, her father is ill, and she's stumbled somewhat in her career. There are no easy answers here, which I love and have grown accustomed to Levy's work. This was such a treat, and a perfect cure for my reading slump,

Thanks so much to the publisher for the e-galley.

Okay, I'm officially baffled: Acclaimed experimental author Deborah Levy serves us a blue-haired, orphaned protagonist named Elsa (birth name: Anne) who struggles to let it go - is that super funny or super stupid? I'm still not sure (brain freeze). Disney allusions aside, I was intrigued by this story about an (allegedly) 34-year-old famous pianist who, at a concert in Vienna (capital of psychoanalysis, people!), suddenly diverts from the Rachmaninoff she is supposed to play, leading to public humiliation. After the incident, she travels through Europe, giving piano lessons (fun fact: Rachmaninoff himself had a depressive episode after one of his premieres went South, in this period he made a living giving piano lessons).

We meet Elsa after the Rach debacle in Greece, her blue hair an indicator of her trying to break free from the strict rules she had been subjected to since being a child prodigy: She was given up by her mother and lived with a foster family, when Arthur, an influential piano teacher adopted her and started further training her at six years old. But there is another layer to this: she also aims to prevent any resemblance to her unknown parents ("Blue was a separation from my DNA."). In Greece, Elsa sees a doppelgaenger buying a set of mechanical horses, and becomes obsessed with the women who she sees both as herself and her mother - and she wants to take the horses from her.

So classic Levy does her enigmatic metaphor stuff once again, and I'm here for it: The sea and the extraction of spines from sea animals play an important role (cue to Hot Milk and the painting August Blue by Henry Scott Tuke) as well as the central motif of artistic control and personal artistic expression. Elsa first diverts from the Rach, then becomes enchanted by Isadora Duncan, pioneer of modern dance who broke the rules of her time in order to find artistic freedom. The students she meets, a thirteen-year-old boy and a sixteen-year-old girl, also struggle with parental expectations and their own self-expression, as well as gender roles. At some point, Elsa needs to defend herself against a man from Dresden (a city particularly beloved by Rachmaninoff) to get her phone (a means to communicate) back.

Also, family is a central theme: Is (allegedly) 80-year-old (the timeline does not match up) Arthur, the piano teacher, a type of father, or was their relationship strictly professional? What rights does Arthur's long term gay lover have? What role does Elsa's biological mother play, for whom she searches in the doppelgaenger with the horses, in the doppelgaenger's trilby she found, in piano music? She sees the doppelgaenger in Athens, in London, in Paris, and many other shadows and echoes appear in names, events, characters. Much like in The Man Who Saw Everything, readers know that this is a case of shattered identity, or rather a woman who is confronted with the disparate parts of her identity that reveal themselves as separate, but connected. The pandemic raging around her, the faces hidden behind blue surgical masks Elsa sees everywhere heighten the sense of alienation.

Another artist the text mentions early on is relevant here: Agnès Varda, a pioneering feminist French director with a love for eccentric hairstyles (let me just say: two-tone bowl cuts). She moved away from traditional forms of storytelling in order to reflect her time and add social commentary. Elsa also looks for ways to tell her story not as her life-long training prescribes it, but in a manner she feels is truthful and authentic (hello, female gender roles and what they teach us all of our lives).

It's just a joy to puzzle over Levy's texts, and this narrative riddle, rendered in captivating, lyrical prose, is no exception.

Well, it's Levy, so I am somewhat predisposed to love it. I have read virtually everything she's published (even obscure novelty items like Diary of a Steak and An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell) - except, inexplicably enough, her plays (since that's my field) - which I just find incomprehensible on any level. She's perhaps my favorite contemporary literary author; she is certainly in the top three.

So I was genuinely ecstatic for her first new novel since her 2019 Booker-nominated The Man Who Saw Everything (... still disgruntled it did not win! Especially over Atwood's retread and the dreadful Evaristo!). And Ms. Levy has not disappointed. This new novel seems a logical extension of the themes of identity, time, memory and life purpose that constituted those of the earlier book. But even though that book was a flat-out masterpiece - this might even top it.

I raced through the book in a day (it's short, and can easily be read in 3-4 hours), so will definitely go back and reread soon to pick up on what I might have missed - Levy is one author who almost demands multiple readings. And it's just so much FUN - and intellectual exercise - to 'connect the dots'.

As with all Levy, the book is enigmatic and defies categorization. Suffice it to say that this concerns a 34-year-old world famous pianist, who becomes disoriented playing a Rachmaninoff concerto in Vienna, stops performing, dyes her hair blue (one of the many allusions of the title) ... and spends the next year (in the early times of the Covid pandemic and masking) giving piano lessons in foreign lands - where she continually runs into a mysterious woman who she feels is her double. This all seems somewhat reminiscent of the Bergman film 'Persona' - but there MIGHT also be allusions to the more recent Disney classic 'Frozen' - the pianist is known as Elsa M. Anderson, but her birth name was Ann (i.e., a variation of Anna).

What does this all mean or add up to? - well, the main thing I LOVE about Levy is that she doesn't bludgeon her audience with easy answers or neat, tidy summations. Each reader will bring their own baggage and prejudices to a reading of this - and if the Booker committee doesn't see fit to at least put this on 2023's longlist, I'm leading the protest!

My profuse gratitude to FS&G and Netgalley for allowing me the privilege of reading this ARC a full 6.5 months prior to publication!

Sidenote/fun fact: I am also crazy-happy that Levy's Hot Milk is even as I speak being turned into a film starring the luminous Jessie Buckley and national treasure Fiona Shaw. Can. Not. Wait.