Hot Milk: Deborah Levy

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Gorgeous . . . 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. Yes, the link between the mother’s body and her child’s body is there, isn’t it? Sofia is her mother’s carer, so she feels that, in a way, she is her mother’s legs. Sofia’s body is deeply imprinted with both personal and cultural memories which she cannot erase. Towards the end of the novel, after a heated disagreement with her mother, Sofia escapes the clinical confines of Almeria. Defiantly, she travels to Greece, where her father is living with his young wife and new-born baby, having abandoned Sofia’s mother in London when Sofia was a child. When she arrives in Greece, the birthplace of her estranged father, and therefore the origin of her own lost heritage, she reflects: ‘’Here I am in the birthplace of the Medusa, who left the scars of her venom and rage on my body’’. Indeed, Sofia’s body is literally covered in jellyfish stings (the word ‘Medusa’ being the Greek word for jellyfish( – the result of ignoring the red flags warning of jellyfish in the sea whilst swimming in Spain. Her body has also been metaphorically lacerated by the traumatic events in her life, especially the callous departure of her father, and his unwillingness to look after her and her mother. A thrilling and propulsive novel of an Antarctica expedition gone wrong and its far-reaching consequences for the explorers and their families "leaves the reader moved and subtly changed, as if she had become part of the story" (Hilary Mantel). David Gelber: Chancellors & Chancers - Austria Behind the Mask: Politics of a Nation since 1945 by Paul Lendvai

Levy’s last novel, Swimming Home, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2012, having initially failed to find a publisher at all. Rejected for being “too literary” for the marketplace, apparently, it was taken up by And Other Stories, a subscription-based, not-for-profit publishing house. Since Hot Milk is being published by Penguin Random House, it seems fair to guess that the accolade of a Booker shortlisting has removed the presumed literary stain from this novel, which shares themes and obsessions with its predecessor. There is a sun-bleached, Mediterranean setting; explorations of troubled familial bonds, of the nature of sexuality, an examination of exile – and repeated motifs of incantatory language. “My love for my mother is like an axe,” Sofia says, more than once. “It cuts very deep.” 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 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. You’ve chosen motherhood in literature as your theme; first of all, please can we talk a little about the mother in your new novel Hot Milk? Hot Milk frequently pans from the personal to the political. The waters of Almería’s beaches are infested with jellyfish, portentous refugees from a damaged ecosystem; Sophie ruminates on the conditions endured by local agricultural workers and the developing-world origins of various consumer goods; the privations of austerity economics are everywhere apparent. Indeed, the book’s preoccupation with kinship feels acutely relevant. In years to come, the profound societal impact of an ageing population will prompt more of us to reflect, like Sophie, on how a ‘wife can be a mother to her husband and a son can be a husband or a mother to his mother and a daughter can be a sister or a mother to her mother who can be a father and a mother to her daughter’.Levy’s language is precise. The absurdities of her style seem scattershot at first, but yield a larger pattern: a commentary on debt and personal responsibility, family ties and independence.

Read with Gloucester Book Club. Can’t decide whether I liked this or not.... it didn’t provoke strong emotions in me but it’s undeniably a well written character study, and while our heroine is 25 years old, she seems emotionally delayed in her development. I would call Hot Milk a coming of age story with the colors of blue and white playing mainstage with stabs of bright yellow popping in. Blue, venomous snakes and starfish appear in this sexually symbolic drama where even names have meaning. While it is not noted in the book, I noticed that the mother is an English Rose and the Greek Orthodox father is called Christo. I think this author is much cleverer than we know, probably too clever for me to completely understand the symbolism. The title itself may well be emblematic of the female breast - Milk being the sustenance we all live off as infants, and for a mother-daughter tale, very appropriate. Although there is no plot, we are taken on a journey with Sophia and her mother, feeling their increasing rage and frustration,

Media Reviews

Deborah Levy is the author of seven novels, and she has been shortlisted twice for the Goldsmiths Prize and three times for the Booker Prize. 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. Hot Milk is haunted by the figure of Medusa; the spectre of a woman who has been punished for her femininity (turned into a monster by Athena who is jealous of her beauty) and is forced the bear the scars of her punishment. This idea resonates throughout the novel – the cruel sense of injustice and the problematic presence and effect of ‘woman’. It is the collective bodies of the women in the novel who suffer the most at the hands of men. This, however, hints at the broader problems which grow out of the mythologising of social structures. 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.

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 A Deborah Levy— My father is Jewish, and his parents were Lithuanians who came to South Africa and owned a fish shop. And then my lovely grandmother Leah decided that she stunk of fish and that she would go into lingerie. I’ve always loved that mix of fish and lingerie.

Book Summary

I’m also interested in the way that Colette’s father is portrayed. He seems to have one leg from a war injury, he is more intellectual than his wife, he’s wilder, and Colette writes about him fondly, but, somehow, he seems to be a peripheral player in this abundant rural childhood. 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. 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.” It’s an absolutely brilliant, subversive and very loving film. I was thinking about the quote from Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’. Almódovar explores this in All About My Mother. It means that gender is an aspect of identity that we acquire: we work with or against mainstream cultural interpretations of being female and male. Almódovar asks us, ‘what is an authentic woman, what is an authentic man?’ 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). 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)

Deborah Levy has a story, 'Weeping Machines', in the fourth issue of The White Review. You can buy it here. A beguiling tale of myths and identity ... provocative ... The difficult, ambivalent, precious mother-daughter relationship forms the core of this beautiful, clever novel. Hot Milk was developed by Bonnie Productions together with Film4 and is produced by Oscar nominee and BAFTA winner Christine Langan ( The Lost King, The Phantom of the Open, The Queen). Executive producers are Farhana Bhula, Ollie Madden and Daniel Battsek for Film4. The film is in pre-production and will start shooting in September in Almería. Through the opposing figures of mother and daughter, Deborah Levy explores the strange and monstrous nature of womanhood. Dreamlike and utterly compulsive, Hot Milk is a delirious fairy tale of feminine potency, a story both modern and timeless. 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?’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.” Acutely relevant ... A triumph of technically adroit storytelling. Levy's elegant and poised prose has the rare quality of being simultaneously expansive and succinct ... A breath of fresh air. We live in a world full of myths constructed in the past; sexuality, success, education, the economic crisis and our families are all subject to these narratives. A myth has the power to convince people that signs (our names, genders, religious preferences) have inherent value: that a woman must be inherently feminine due to her sex. In Hot Milk, Sofia muses how ‘we are all getting in each other’s signs’ – woman become men, daughters becomes mothers, fathers become sons. She idolises her lover Ingrid, not for the reasons men are drawn to her objective womanliness: her tall body, blonde hair, large breasts. Sofia loves her for the way she fractures the myth of womanhood: Ingrid is strong, rebellious. The duality of her sexuality are expressed in Sofia’s observation that ‘the curves of her body are female but sometimes she sounds like Matthew’. Nothing is stable or solid in this strange land that Sofia is passing through. Myths do not exist – everything exists only in the moment, beautiful exactly for what it is. The Medusa is no longer a hideous creature – she is the protective symbol on Athena’s war shield. We are returned to the epigraph: it’s up to you to break the old circuits. As Orson Welles told us, if we want a happy ending, it depends on where we stop the story. One January night I was eating coconut rice and fish in a bar on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. A tanned, tattooed American man sat at the table next to me. He was in his late 40s, big muscled arms, his silver hair pinned into a bun. He was talking to a young English woman, perhaps 19 years old, who had been sitting on her own reading a book, but after some ambivalence had taken up his invitation to join him. At first he did all the talking. After a while she interrupted him. 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.