Book Review – August Blue by Deborah Levy ★★★☆☆

Title:  August Blue

Author:  Deborah Levy

Genres: Literary Fiction, Contemporary

Pages: 208

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Publication Date: 4th May 2023

Source: Thanks to Penguin and Netgalley

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.

All of Deborah Levy’s fictional works have a kind of dreamy unreality and this is no exception. This is a short book but the prose is beautiful in its simplicity and the story both fairly vague and metaphorical. Elsa is a piano virtuoso who was adopted by her teacher at a young age. Now she is in her 30’s and having a touch of a psychological crisis. Her teacher is frail and elderly and she is losing the plot, first going off script at a piano recital and then seeing the same woman, a double of herself in cities all over Europe. Is this woman supposed to be a sign of a fractured psyche? Or is is some other metaphor? To be honest it just goes right over my head.

The battles Elsa has with her adopted father’s lover where interesting but it all seemed a little insipid and much is left to subtext.

This book left me feeling a little dissatisfied and a little confused, I think I will stick with her non-fiction in future.

What I liked:

• Beautifully simple prose

What didn’t work for me:

• Too clever by far

Suitable For: Adults

 A dreamy hallucinatory kind of novel.

Goodreads

Deborah Levy has been writing for a long time now, but admittedly she has only been on my radar when  her novel The Man Who Saw Everything was longlisted for the Booker Prize. She trained at Dartington College of Arts (about 15 miles from me) in the 80s and has written a plethora of plays, eight previous novels and many published short stories. She is also a published poet. I have read a couple of her novels but so far, I like her non fiction the best.

She was born in South Africa has been married, had two daughters and then divorced and as far as I know she lives in London.

If you want to know more her Wikipedia page appears to be fairly comprehensive. It is refreshing to see that she doesn’t have a website or any social media.