Hot Milk: Deborah Levy

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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?In Levy’s hypnotic tale of female sexuality two women arrive in a village on the Spanish coast. Rose is suffering from a strange illness and her doctors are mystified. Her daughter Sofia has brought her here to find a cure with the celebrated and controversial Dr Gomez. It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world, too. He had taken a risk when he invited her to join him at his table. After all, she came with a whole life and libido of her own. It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character. In this sense, she had unsettled a boundary, collapsed a social hierarchy, broken with the usual rituals. She could have stopped the story by describing the wonder of all she had seen in the deep calm sea before the storm. That would have been a happy ending, but she did not stop there. She was asking him (and herself) a question: do you think I was abandoned by that person on the boat? I was thinking clearly, lucidly; the new situation had freed something that had been trapped and stifled. I became physically strong at 50, just as my bones were supposed to be losing their strength. I had energy because I had no choice but to have energy. I had to write to support my children and I had to do all the heavy lifting. Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.

A Deborah Levy— Well, her writerly attention is always in an interesting place. She had an impoverished childhood in Vietnam and this was explored in her novel The LoveR. It is here in her masterpiece, published when she was 70, that you will find one of the most devastating seductions ever written. A teenage white girl has an affair with a Chinese financier, and it’s not just an erotic forbidden sexual encounter, it’s an essay on how colonialism messes everyone up. Duras is a totally unsentimental, mind-blowing writer, and the formal design of her fiction is often beautifully cinematic because she wrote and directed for film too.Our book club (Wine Women and Words) had plenty to say on this one. For some the exploration of the mother daughter relationship touched more than a few chords with its insights into the tensions of the relationship between Sofia and Rose. Did Hot Milk do more than scratch the surface on this though? Some thought so and praised the depth of characterisation while others felt they never really got to know the two main characters well enough. All were agreed on the beauty of the book's language though and the power of the themes that made us think - family ties, responsibility and mothering. 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. What makes the book so good is Ms. Levy’s great imagination, the poetry of her language, her way of finding the wonder in the everyday, of saying a lot with a little, of moving gracefully among pathos, danger and humor and of providing a character as interesting and surprising as Sofia. It’s a pleasure to be inside Sofia’s insightful, questioning mind. To strip the wallpaper off the fairytale of The Family House in which the comfort and happiness of men and children has been the priority is to find behind it an unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted woman. It requires skill, time, dedication and empathy to create a home that everyone enjoys and that functions well. This task is still mostly perceived as women’s work. Consequently, there are all kinds of words used to belittle this huge endeavour. If the wife and mother has been impregnated by society, she is playing everyone’s wife and mother. She has built the story the old patriarchy has designed for the nuclear heterosexual family, and of course added a few contemporary flourishes of her own. To not feel at home in her family home is the beginning of the bigger story of society and its female discontents. If she is not too defeated by the societal story she has enacted with hope, pride, happiness, ambivalence and rage, she will change the story. Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs Aristotle tells us that all politics starts in the family, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the infamously fraught relationship between mother and daughter. Here, the novelist, playwright and poet Deborah Levy chooses five books – or rather, four books and one film – that explore motherhood.

Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’ In Deborah Levy's Hot Milk the main character, Sofia, spends time on the beach in Spain and is stung by jellyfish. The jellyfish, eerily beautiful yet often painful to humans, is one of a few creatures benefitting from global warming. Its numbers, which remained stable for a period, are now rising in many areas of the world. To speak our life as we feel it is a freedom we mostly choose not to take, but it seemed to me that the words she wanted to say were lively inside her, mysterious to herself as much as anyone else. He was probably the wrong reader for her story, but I thought on balance that she might be the right reader for mine. Deborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their "intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination", including PAX, HERESIES for the Royal Shakespeare Company, CLAM, CALL BLUE JANE, SHINY NYLON, HONEY BABY MIDDLE ENGLAND, PUSHING THE PRINCE INTO DENMARK and MACBETH-FALSE MEMORIES, some of which are published in LEVY: PLAYS 1 (Methuen)So it’s inspiring to see Sofia begin to find perspective, to feel empathy and understanding toward others. These include Ingrid, the sexy woman whom she also begins sleeping with; Dr. Gómez’s oddly lazy daughter, a nurse in his clinic; and even her father’s new wife, who has troubles of her own. For one thing, she is 40 years younger than Sofia’s father. Deborah Levy has a story, 'Weeping Machines', in the fourth issue of The White Review. You can buy it here. Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’ But one of Sofia’s problems is that she can’t see herself straight on. In thrall to her mother, she fails even to succeed in the simple task of bringing her the right kind of water. Preparing for their visit to the Gomez clinic, having described herself as both illness’s witness and its detective, she remarks: “My mother will display her various symptoms to the consultant like an assortment of mysterious canapes. I will be holding the tray.”

Doris Lessing refers to a scene where Sido makes herself a cup of hot chocolate at night. Above her bed, there’s a spider in a web, and the mother would wait for the spider to let herself down and sip from the hot chocolate, and then, heavy with its nectar, it would go up again. I love that image so much. It doesn’t really matter if it is imagined or true.

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. To separate from love is to live a risk-free life. What’s the point of that sort of life? As I wheeled my electric bike through the park on the way to my writing shed, my hands had turned blue from the cold. I had given up wearing gloves because I was always grappling in the dark to find keys. I stopped by the fountain, only to find it had been switched off. A sign from the council read, “This fountain has been winterised.” I had mixed feelings about this book. It has a dreamlike narrative that explores mother daughter relationship and identity.