With a doppelgänger novel, Deborah Levy embodies strangeness
On a recent morning in a North London Turkish café, Deborah Levy loosened the silk scarf around her neck in preparation. “Breakfast together has arrived,” the writer announced as plates of fruit, cheese and fried eggs were placed in front of her.
In Levy’s new novel “August Blue”, a blue-haired piano virtuoso named Elsa M. Anderson repeatedly encounters a woman she is convinced is her double. The sightings take place in Athens and Paris, but also over a sumptuous Mediterranean breakfastin the same London café.
‘August Blue’ is Levy’s eighth novel and since the age of 20 she has been refining her ability to evoke feelings through writing rather than telling. Her work is strongly influenced by art forms that express the embodied experience, such as film and dance. “The body in the world,” she said. “How difficult. It’s my subject.”
Born in South Africa before moving to England as a child, Levy, 63, is a poet, playwright and author. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Parul Sehgal described Levy’s lucid prose as “light-handed” and left “a pleasant sting,” and Levy has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2020, she received the prestigious Prix Femina Étranger of France for her memoirs“Things I Don’t Want to Know” and“The Cost of Living.”
In the decade since her first memoirs were published, Levy has written at a prolific pace—publishing six other books—and has enjoyed new commercial success in Britain and the United States. “It’s like she’s enlightened,” says Levy editor Simon Prosser.
Over breakfast, she said her memoirs, or “living autobiographies,” paint a complicated picture of female existence at the old-fashioned ages of 40 and 50. birthday in Paris. Levy lived there for a year while on a fellowship at Columbia University’s Institute of Ideas and Imagination, where he researched the idea of the doppelgänger. That research became “August Blue”, which will be published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 6.
“August Blue” opens in a crowded Athens flea market, where Elsa sees her double, both faces partially covered in face masks. “They’re both mocking each other,” Levy said.
She liked the eerieness of the image, she said, which was inspired by films by David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock and in particular Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1991 thriller “The Double Life of Veronique.” But she noticed that the doubles in those Movies “Always sinister,” Levy said. What if Elsa could have a little more fun with her doppelgänger? The character is “absorbed by it, freaked out by it, excited by it,” Levy said quietly as he leaned across the table.
When writing “August Blue,” Levy liked the idea of using the doppelgänger to explore the mind and the way “we all talk to ourselves.” She explored the Freudian idea of the double, she said, as the physical manifestation of a dissociated or split self.
Despite the parsimoniousness of her prose, Levy’s writing is psychologically complex, and Prosser said that “below the surface of these words so beautifully placed” are “undercurrents”, which give her work its power.
The novel was also guided by the use of repetition and structure in the music of minimalist composer Philip Glass. “I even think he’s a maximalist,” she said. “It’s like he’s lighting a fire under all the emotions I’m thinking at the time.”
Levy learned how to “embody ideas” in her writing, she said, during her formative years in experimental theater and movement. Encouraged by filmmaker Derek Jarman, whom she met as a teenager in a London cinema, she trained at Dartington College of Arts, on the English coast, in the early 1980s.
She described the interdisciplinary education there as “probably a bit like the Black Mountain School,” referring to North Carolina’s experimental liberal arts college. She spent the next two decades writing plays, as well as short stories, poems and novels, and from the early 2000s taught writing and raised her two daughters.
Prosser, who has been Levy’s editor since 2013, said he first became “really aware” of Levy in 2012 when her novel “Swimming Home” was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. “The way she writes is perfectly clear,” he said. He signed her to Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin, and republished her early novels, which were out of print.
Around this time, as Levy’s star rose, her marriage was coming to an end. She wrote about this tension in “The Cost of Living,” which follows her search for a new template for both her creative and domestic life as a single woman reaching middle age.
“There’s a trail of breadcrumbs for generations of other writers to add to,” she said of her living autobiography trilogy. “Do you think I should make it a quartet?” she asked conspiratorially.
In Paris, Levy’s colleagues were also impressed by her life model. Levy remembered the year she spent there researching doppelgängers and being embedded in a community of other artists as one of “reflection and thinking, and great libraries and excellent food.” At the Institute, writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo’s office was directly below Levy’s.
In a phone interview, Guo, who is also a memoirist, said she and Levy “shared a camaraderie as mothers and tried to maintain a certain amount of freedom in raising children,” adding that Levy “has this great quality of improvising life.” “.
Several of Levy’s novels deal with family dynamics, two of which are being made into films: ‘Swimming Home’ and ‘Hot Milk’. Levy isn’t involved in either project, but she said she’d like to edit “August Blue” and her 2019 novel “The Man Who Saw Everything,” writing the screenplays herself this time around.
“Hot Milk” stars Emma Mackey (“Sex Education”), Vicky Krieps (“Phantom Thread”), and Fiona Shaw (“Killing Eve”). The novel follows a young English woman who takes her hypochondriac mother to a clinic in Spain in search of a cure.
“She writes about silence in a cinematic way,” Krieps said in a recent video interview. “You feel the silence and you see the silence,” she added. Krieps, who said she was a fan of Levy’s writing prior to joining the film, described Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s screenplay for “Hot Milk” as “actually weird” and therefore close to the spirit of the novel.
“It takes courage as a woman,” she added, “to write, show or embody strangeness.”