Acclaimed author Deborah Levy, in a stirring collection of essays pays tribute to the feminine in general and some of the obscure as well as famous literary and artistic women, who have served as beacons of inspiration in ger own authorial endeavours. The Position of Spoons is a powerful homage to the indomitable spirit.

The first essay titled “Bathed in an Arc of French Light” sets the stage for the rest of the book. Expressing her unabashed admiration for French novelist, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, known monymously as Colette, Levy writes about the influence of Colette on her life from a very early age. “When I started to read her books, all that was transgressive and sensuous in her writing blew like a wind from Burgundy, Paris and the south of France into the damp suburban gardens of London”, writes Levy.

If Colette was the very epitome of transgression, Marguerite Duras worked magic by adhering to the principle of being economical with words. Miserly, yet magnanimous, Duras’s spare albeit revealing style of writing wove its own tapestry of influence on Levy. Terming Duras’s The Lover, a work of incandescence, Levy contending that the book is more existential in nature than feminist, expresses her doubts on the prospects of the same being published in the contemporaneous era. The Lover was penned in the year 1984.

On January 19, 1981, twenty-two-year-old Francesca Woodman jumped to her death from a loft window of a building on the East Side of New York. The teenager, as the world learned much later, had left behind an enduring legacy in the form of her haunting and almost metaphysical collection of black and white pictures, many of which featured herself. Levy in her emotional essay “Walking Out of The Frame”, pays tribute to both the persona and photographs of Francesca Woodman. Realising that Levy herself is clad in a pair of boots similar to that worn by Woodman in one of her pictures, Levy underscores the importance of ‘getting a grip’ while attempting to walk out of what she calls the frame of femininity, into something vaguer, and something more blurred.

The Position of Spoons also embeds within its confines an appreciable degree of interiority. Levy in a refreshingly transparent manner opens the doors to her own life by narrating experiences, both celebratory and sombre. In an eerily titled essay “A to Z Of The Death Drive”, Lecy relates each of the English alphabet with something to an automobile while describing the death of a famous persona in a road accident. The word C representing Camus (Albert Camus) and Cochran (Eddie Cochran) for example, concentrates on the accidents leading to the demise of both Cochran and Camus. The alphabet D as an ode to James Dean has this meagre assemblage of words, “Kenneth Anger owns a mangled piece of Dean’s cursed Porsche Spyder bought for $300.”

The Position of Spoons is ambivalent yet lucid, concealing yet transparent. This collection of essays, more than anything else, is a testimony to the prowess of Deborah Levy as a formidable author.

The Position of Spoons is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and will be available on sale from Oct 01, 2024.

Thank You Net Galley for the Advance Reviewer Copy!

This book is composed of short essays, mostly about art and literature. It contains Deborah Levy's discussions on works by well-known authors like Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, the painter Paula Rego, and the poet Hope Mirrlees. 

What I appreciated most, however, were the glimpses of Levy’s more personal writing: casual anecdotes about her life, friends, family, and previous partners. I enjoyed reading about her approach to writing, her artistic process, and mentions of the periods in which she was writing Hot Milk or Swimming Home. 

As a whole, the book reads like a fragmented access into her radiant mind. I ultimately found it pleasant to read sparingly over several weeks.

A few essays attempt to be more eccentric, yet I found these a bit forced. I preferred reading about Levy’s own life in her signature straightforward and vivid sentences. At times, it reminded me of The Cost of Living, my favorite of the Living Autobiography series. 

I don’t believe this book to be a Levy essential, but her company stood as delightful as ever. 

Thank you to FSG for the ARC.

I love love love Deborah Levy, both her fiction and non-fiction in equal measure, and will read anything of hers as soon as I can. THE POSITION OF SPOONS does not disappoint. These are fleeting pieces whose subjects are wide-ranging. I thought a lot about Marguerite Duras' Practicalities, and also Writing. Poignancy abounds.

Thank you to the publisher for the e-galley.

I would read anything by Deborah Levy! I did enjoy this overall but found it a bit uneven, some of the literary criticism pieces didn’t catch me and I ending up flipping over them. Not my favourite of her works but still a worthwhile read.

..it's literally if Levy had a Twitter account lol

what i imagine to be what Amina Cain did for folks with A Horse at Night: On Writing. sparse in form yet chockfull of heart and admiration for all the writers who made her. loved especially her thoughts on women, the center of women in fiction, and their writing lives (ie Simone de Beauvoir).

the end swims with a lot of heart, gets personal, deep in Levy's own spirit as a writer. writing isn't merely little letters on a white page. it's entire lifetimes, fragrant of past, trying to echo towards an urge, a thirst to pick up the body and move it through the world.

While I adored (and still do!) Deborah Levy's "living autobiography" series, this collection - comprised of slim essays, experimental observations and loose, meandering thoughts on artists, writers, and everything in between - was, to me, a little more hit-or-miss than spot-on. In fact, the essays which resonated most strongly with me (to the point that their shortness was a disappointment, Levy's way with words so original and magnetic that I felt I was keen to read more of them) were the pieces which drew heavily from her own life: the letter to her mother, for example, was a tender, affective insight into the nature of mother-daughter relationships. Elsewhere, I found my interest waning - the nature of essay collections, especially those which centre around artists or authors I am not entirely familiar with, tend to produce this effect - and, while there was nothing wrong with the style or quality of Levy's prose, in general it failed to really strike much of a chord with me. The loose structure of the collection was also somewhat unsettling; as a whole collection, there didn't feel as if there was much coherence, or a sense of the essays working towards a united aim or idea.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for this free e-ARC!

Incredible.
I had never read any Deborah Levy before this and this book has made me want to go and read all of her back catalogue. Part literary criticism, part memoir, The Position of Spoons shares little vignettes into Levy’s philosophy on the world with prose that is effortless.

interesting deborah levy! i prefer her longer non-fiction, im not sure if these smaller snacky essays topics worked as well for me compared to her more memoir based work. at the end of the day i prefer her fiction most of all.

Deborah is a wonderful writer. If my count is right - I’ve read ten of her books. It’s true to say I think deeper when reading her books. I grow….I make new discoveries. Her writing feels personal in an important way. It’s important to me. Heck - I’ve added several more books I plan to read ‘because’ of the way Levy shared about those books and authors. Elizabeth Hardwick for sure.

In many ways these stories are a tribute to many of our greatest authors — (I definitely include Levy) - to literature- to artists - to philosophers - to life.

Topics galore are covered. The blurb already stole the first quote I wanted to share: (haha! - Darn them….but I’ll share it too)….
On Footwear:
“It has always been very clear to me that people who wear shoes without socks, are destined to become my friends and lovers”.

Lots to learn (in a fun- reading-exciting way) in these stories. MUCH I didn’t know. I’m thankful for some literary holes Levy provided for me.
Small tidbit I learned - I didn’t know that anything about Lynn Turner. She was an American writer that was convicted in the poisoning deaths of two of her husbands. She died in 2010 at age 42.
I couldn’t find anything Turner wrote (checked google) … maybe they don’t include books written by a murderer?
I did find another American author with the same ‘Lynn Turner’ name. I felt a little bad. I don’t think I would enjoy sharing the first and last name with a murderer.

Back to Levy…. and me sharing a few snippet gems . . .
“Colette was presenting herself in a way that appealed to my teenage idea of what a European female writer might be like. Glamorous, serious, intellectual, playful - with a mean, sleek cat sitting on her writing desk amongst the flowers, all of them bathed in a glowing arc of French light”.

Marguerite Duras
“The purpose of language for Duras is to nail a catastrophe to the page”.
“She thinks as deeply as it is possible to think without dying of pain. It is all or nothing for Duras. She puts everything in to language. The more she puts in, the fewer words she uses. Words can be nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

To write ‘The Lover’, Duras did not distrust emotion.
“She was a reckless thinker, egomaniac, a bit preposterous”.

Them And Us:
“We owe a great deal to the grandly expressive female hysterics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their apparently inexplicable symptoms (loss of voice, paralysis of limbs, anorexia, bulimia, chronic fatigue, fainting fits, indifference to life) were asking subversive questions about femininity: what doesn’t mean to be a woman? What should a woman be? Who is your body supposed to please and what is it for? If she is required to cancel her own desires, what is she supposed to do with them? Hysteria is the language of the protesting body”.
“At the start of Freud’s career in patriarchal Vienna, he was under the impression there was one sexuality, and that it was male. Fortunately, he changed his mind, but he humbly confessed that after thirty years of professional practice, he still did not know what woman wanted”.

🥰
“If I were to measure the love of mothers for their children with coffee spoons, there would never be enough spoons for that kind of love”.

If you already know that you are a Deborah Levy fan — choosing to read these stories is a no brainer.
But if you are completely new to Levy — dip your toes in.
Deborah Levy, (British novelist, playwright, and poet), has a lot to offer readers.
She was born in South Africa. She was educated in the United Kingdom. She wrote numerous plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company….many published novels and short stories and an autobiography…..as well as her “living autobiographies” books….
Levy is an author to read > PERIOD!
“She especially likes looking at one character through another, and is interested in women who don’t have homes and aren’t sure where to look for them”. I AM INTERESTED IN THIS TOO. (more personal than I want to share here).

One last quote …

Levy writes about: Violette Leduc:
“She is a writer who energizes whatever she gives her attention to, an orange shrivelling in the sun, an ink stain on a table, the white porcelain of a salad bowl. Leduc refused to bore herself. Nothing is decoratively arranged to suggest atmosphere or a sense of place or to set a scene. Everything on the page is there because the narrator perceives it as doing something”.

Elyse (yeah little old me) writes about Deborah Levy:
She can write pretty much anything and make it sail smoothly in the wind. Her stories are full of energy and insight.
While life is complicated and dangerous and full of yearning……Levy gives us unpretentious honesty and intelligence….in the context of loving passion for language and life.

This was a solid collection of essays on a variety of topics. I enjoyed most of them, but they weren’t as hard hitting as I would have liked. I would have preferred more focus on Levy’s life and experiences than the discussion of other works. This collection felt like a bunch of scraps thrown together, but in a good way.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for the ARC.

Thanks to NetGalley and FSG For the ARC!

"The Position of Spoons" is an apt title for Deborah Levy’s collection of table scraps, a book that reads like unchecked self-indulgence or a contractual obligation to a publisher— haphazard, incomplete, and disengaged.

This is a remarkably odd collection of essayettes. It feels like someone shook out a desk drawer full of notes and said, “That’s it. That’s the book.” These are B-sides to an unreleased album, lacking the context readers would need to appreciate them even as fragments. They are not even half-formed thoughts—they feel like afterthoughts, the echo of ideas without their incitement. They are writerly and aphoristic in all the wrong ways, seemingly desperate to impress readers but completely disinterested in engaging with them. If you’ve ever had someone interrupt a conversation for no other reason than to convince you that they are the most interesting person in the room, you’ve already experienced what "The Position of Spoons" has on offer.

To state it more bluntly, the prose feels student-like—cocksure, with all of the masculine insecurities implicit in the word. The imagery Levy relies on feels undeveloped, and emphatically so. An effective image should feel unexpected but inevitable, but that isn’t the case here. As an example, early in the book, Levy compares socklessness to godlessness. It feels like the whisper of a clever idea, but it ends there—a shorthand gesture towards nothing in particular.

The book isn’t without its merits. I enjoyed “Migrations to Elswhere and Other Pains,” an off-kilter inversion of Alice in Wonderland. It’s feverish, impenetrable, and off-putting, but it’s one of the lone pieces in this collection that feels like a complete draft rather than the notebook scrawlings that comprise most of the book. Similarly, by the second half of the collection, the individual pieces feel slightly more coherent—if disorganized—but by that point, Levy has soured any possible goodwill. More than anything, the whole book just feels inessential, which is strange considering how beloved its author is. I fully believe Deborah Levy is a great writer, but she just doesn’t feel very present in this book.

Perhaps my appreciation would be different if I were familiar with Deborah Levy’s acclaimed other work, but that’s just it—I think a book should be able to stand alone as an object.

If it can’t, it’s not a book; it’s a vanity project.

‘I transmit these thoughts to you from the marshes and silent canals of Hackney, East London, to the curved bay of Cádiz, Spain, and on and under and it is in my mind to tell you that all thoughts can be bent like a spoon.’
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This books is as if Deborah Levy is that very good friend you’ve got, but who you only see every few weeks/months and when you meet up you end up discussing all sorts of random subjects while drinking wine and smoking Marlboros.
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She talks about falling in love with Colette before even reading her books (10000000% get that) - ‘When I started to read her books, all that was transgressive and sensuous in her writing blew like a wind from Burgundy, Paris and the South of France into the damp suburban gardens of London.’

And then she goes on and talks about Marguerite Duras - I immediately had to go and buy The Lover on my lunch break.

About how special shoes can tell a person will do great things in life and how corners of London can invoke the most powerful feelings any day.
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Truly loved this book and I definitely recommend it to whoever wants an insight to Deborah Levy’s mind.
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Thank you @fsg and NetGalley for the copy!

I really enjoy the way this author writes.
Whilst I enjoyed most of the essays I would say that the Alice rabbit one was my least favourite.
I did particularly enjoy the whimsy of the essays about inanimate objects such as lemons and shoes.

My thanks to NetGalley and FSG for an eARC of this title. I was unfamilar with playwright, fiction writer, and essayist Levy prior to reading this book.
This is a collection of pieces from over the past few years. Essays and reviews of writing and art, and her life. She appears to work harder in the earlier pieces to somewhat shock the reader.
Levy introduced me to some writers and artists I did not know about previously. People like the writers Ann Quin and Hope Merrlees, and the artist Paula Rego. Her essay on J G Ballard is really good as well.
I really appreciated that at the back of the book there is a few pages with complete bibliographic information on each piece. Where and when it was published. I wish more books of short stories and essays did this.
Overall her writing interested me enoughj to order a book of her fiction, and the first of the 3 short volumes of autobiography she has witten.
Informative, and enoyable (in an odd, quirky, kind of way).
4 out of 5.

This book was really interesting, I really like Deborah Levy's writing and her takes on different topics. Some though, did fall flat on me. Like when she was talking about specific writers like Marguerite Duras, I felt like there was no specific point to the chapter, she really didn't say much. And that is how I felt for most of the chapters, but I did have some that I really enjoyed and I caught myself googling the people she wrote about and I was really interested in reading more.
Not my favorite, but I'm willing to read more from Levy soon!

I'd read anything written by Deborah Levy. Many of the essays collected in this collection have been previously published. Mostly this is the case for the book introductions, but I found out that some are extended versions of the published introductions.

I thoroughly enjoyed the texts not related to other books, but to Levy's experience and life. I also found it formally interesting and some text read like reading exercises, inspiring me to try new things with the form of short essays.

Can recommend to anyone familiar with Levy and interested in knowing more of the good stuff that inspires her mind.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the early access to this book!
(My hardback is already pre-ordered!)