Hot Milk: Deborah Levy

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Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realise we don’t want to hold it together. We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview.

Since 2011, and the publication of the Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home , Deborah Levy’s voice has boomed loud and clear across the dreary plains of literary Britain. Those who have seen her speak or read her work can testify that hers is a voice worth hearing – and has been, for years. A successful playwright in the early 1980s ( Pax , Heresies, The B File), Deborah Levy published her first novel Beautiful Mutants in 1989, the next step in a lifelong engagement with form, ideas, and most of all, language. ‘Her prose dazzles like sunlight on water,’ wrote one critic of Swimming Home – an appraisal that, applied to her entire body of work, stands up.AFM Hot List: Keira Knightley, Henry Cavill, Halle Berry, Dev Patel and David Harbour Films Hit the Market

Hot Milk, a story exploring the relationship between a mother and daughter, though in reality this book is an exploration of relationships between Sofia and many others : her father, her friend, her lovers. British stage and screen writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz, whose work includes the Oscar-winning Polish drama Ida, alongside Disobedience and Colette, has lined up a trio of major names for her directorial debut, Hot Milk. Deborah wrote and published her first novel BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS (Vintage), when she was 27 years old. The experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret, was so exhilarating, she wrote a few more. These include, SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY, THE UNLOVED (Vintage) and BILLY and GIRL (Bloomsbury). She has always written across a number of art forms (see Bookworks and Collaborations with visual artists) and was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991. And so the book evolves into an experiment with truth and identity. This isn’t a long novel, but it is dense in the way a poem is dense, rich with meaning poured into its simple language. There seem to be no other patients at the Gómez clinic, its outer walls built from marble so that it resembles “a spectral, solitary breast”. Sofia becomes obsessed with a German seamstress, Ingrid Bauer, “whose body is long and hard like an autobahn”, and who stitches her a shirt with the word “beloved” sewn into its fabric – unless, of course, she has embroidered another word entirely. When Sofia is stung by jellyfish, a young man called Juan tends to her injury; she takes him as her lover, too. After a while she abandons her mother and Ingrid to visit her estranged father with his new young wife and baby in Athens, a broken city, even more damaged than Spain by economic collapse; her father, a wealthy man, confines her to a storeroom with no window and a camp bed that collapses as soon as she lies down on it. So, if we are to believe her, Colette has a perfect childhood in a flowering garden in Burgundy. Nature and nurture, insects and animals do all the talking, and her mother, Sido, is as abundant as a fruit tree in the way that she lavishes care on young Colette. She has four children, who scatter across the house and garden. They are doing their own thing, but they always return to the mother.Frustrations simmer under the surface of relationships in this one, from the chained up dog on the beach to the human interaction between Sofia and her mother, her Greek family and her new friends. They are much like the jellyfish lurking in the sea and the inevitable stings are both physical and psychological. Reflecting this, Sofia cannot be defined by the structures around her. Her Occupation becomes ‘Monster’ when she is forced to state it in a perfunctory form for a lifeguard who takes care of her on the beach after she is stung by jellyfish. Her options are vast: is she a former PhD student turned nurse to her mother? Is she a waitress? She cannot write her whole story in one line and the easiest categorisation is to reduce herself to a ‘Monster’. Similarly with her mother, her illness cannot be rationally identified. Its abstract nature seems incomprehensible to the world but the true cause of her illness is perhaps psychosomatic. She has become paralysed by the tragedy which has overcome her life. Her bones are living tissue which carry the weight of her punishment: her husband who has left her, the daughter she was forced to raise alone who will ultimately also abandon her. I have been sleuthing my mother's symptoms for as long as I can remember. If I see myself as an unwilling detective with a desire for justice, is her illness an unsolved crime? If so, who is the villain and who is the victim? Your fourth book is As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh– Susan Sontag’s collected diaries and notebooks. I think it would be much better for all of us to love the mother herself, and not the delusion. Is that possible?