Deborah Levy: ‘writing And Swimming Help Each Other’
The novelist and memoirist on stamina and solitude, the influence of surrealist art on her work, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s revelatory travel writing
Deborah Levy’s books include three memoirs and eight novels, half of them published between 1989 and 1999, the other half since 2011, when her Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home came out with a small startup press after rejection by traditional publishers. For the Times Literary Supplement, her novels “teem with oddness, with dreamlike, vertiginous scenes … [and characters] in search of a haunting from their past”. When she was again shortlisted for the Booker in 2016 with Hot Milk, a judge said the novel’s “symbolic richness and mythic complexity ... is also underpinned by a wicked humour: it’s like Virginia Woolf with good jokes”. Levy, 64, spoke from her home in London about her most recent novel, August Blue, in which a classical pianist meets her doppelganger while having a breakdown amid the pandemic.
How does a novel start life for you?
An idea or feeling won’t go away. Sometimes, you can’t believe what’s preoccupying you, then it becomes clear that this is what you’re going to write about: you’re going to dig in and find out what’s going on.
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