Hot Milk: Deborah Levy

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But Deborah Levy is no ordinary novelist, and the salacious titbits in her seventh novel are a mere foil. As for me, well as both a mother and a daughter, I enjoyed the exploration of parental exploitation alongside the guilt and frustrations felt with filial obligation. This is a quote from Sontag: ‘I was mother’s mother,’ she felt ‘that somehow I was author of her happiness’.

We met in the morning, so rum was off the cards, but it was late enough to smoke a cigarette rolled in liquorice paper – no filter – in the garden before getting started. Join now to access our Study Guides library, which offers chapter-by-chapter summaries and comprehensive analysis on more than 5,000 literary works from novels to nonfiction to poetry. 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. The jellyfish, eerily beautiful yet often painful to humans, is one of a few creatures benefitting from global warming.This is just conjecture, but it seemed that she was directed to be almost angry about her beauty and that made me smile. From Deborah Levy’s hypnotic, powerful novel of longing, guilt and love, Rebecca has crafted a tense, visceral, cinematic script and brought together a magnificent triumvirate in Fiona, Jessie and Vicky.

This is indeed what Levy encourages us to do through the character of Sofia – to suspend our systematic beliefs and prejudices, to question the world around us as Sofia does.

Perhaps from there we should move on to To the Lighthouse, a book which I adore, as it seems that Mrs Ramsay is not a million miles away from the maternal figure of Sido. I don’t recommend anyone try this at home, and I would never recommend it to my students, but somehow it’s an added thrill of writing, to lose a whole page of writing.