Deborah Levy's 'August Blue'

In his book Minds Made for Stories, the American educator Thomas Newkirk makes the point that to be taken into a book

is to move outside ourselves and to be present (with) a first-rate mind…. It is to experience another sensibility, to sense how the writer notices, contemplates, values. I suspect this fellow-travelling is the great lasting benefit we get from sustained reading of good nonfiction, one that seems into our writing - or so we hope.

Newkirk is writing about a kind of informational non-fiction (in his case, the Pulitzer-winning The Emperor of All Maladies: a biography of cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee). However, that enjoyable experiencing of another sensibility is what we can get from any book - for instance, Deborah Levy’s three-book ‘living autobiography’, a highly pleasurable ‘fellow-travelling’ with the author in her journey from childhood in South Africa to her travels around contemporary Europe.

While Levy’s new book August Blue is a return to fiction, narrated by the much-younger Elsa Anderson, an international concert pianist who abandoned the stage in Vienna due to some form of psychological crisis, the sensibility is still there, and of course the gorgeous prose style. Anderson, who has dyed her hair blue, feels she is being followed around Europe by a kind of double or doppelganger, starting in the flea market in Athens, where she observes that woman buying two mechanical dancing horses (the significance of which becomes clear near the end). She moves from Athens to Poros to London to Paris to Sardinia, where her mentor and adoptive father the aging teacher Arthur Goldstein lives (and then dies). Throughout, all Levy’s strengths give constant pleasure: the suppleness of her prose and her constant attendance to the sensuous shimmer over Elsa’s uncertainty, her attempts to put herself together again. This is also the first novel I have read which handles the pandemic naturally and without clumsiness. If you enjoyed the living autobiography, or any of Levy’s previous novels, you will relish this book too.