Books
Mystery writer
In both her fiction and nonfiction, Deborah Levy seizes on the allusive, the hallucinator y, the poetic—and sensible boots
by Ellen Peirson-Hagger
© COLIN MCPHERSON/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES
There is a feeling of utter randomness to The Position of Spoons: and Other Intimacies, Deborah Levy’s new collection of nonfiction writing. In a world of pithy blurbs—and the publishing industry’s insistence that even disparate pieces of writing can be made to speak to one single, overarching theme—it’s quite wonderful.
Levy doesn’t bother with an introduction, a foreword or an afterword (in which lesser authors would try to force an unnecessar y connection between their various works, or find another to do so on their behalf ). These 34 pieces, of which 29 have been published previously, speak for themselves. The book begins with the first essay, “Bathed in an Arc of French Light”, on Colette. It’s illustrated with a marvellous photograph of the French author sitting at her typewriter, her cat on the desk—and then, on the following left-hand page, Levy’s writing begins. “Preamble, be gone!” the form seems to say. It’s a sentiment that occurs throughout this always wise, always surprising author’s oeuvre.
Levy was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1959. Her father, Norman, was a member of the anti-apartheid African National Congress party, and in 1968 the family fled to London, where Levy grew up. She began her literar y career writing plays and poetry, and released several novels with major publishers in the decade from 1987. Later, she struggled to find an outlet for her novel Swimming Home, which she has said was rejected by numerous editors before it landed with the small press And Other Stories, who published it in 2011.