Levy's memoir trilogy concludes with 'Real Estate,' pondering happiness and a new kind of home. Unlike Rachel Cusk, she keeps herself in the picture.
“The suburb of femininity is not a good place to live,” Deborah Levy wrote in “Things I Don’t Want to Know” , her shrewd response to George Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Why I Write.”
Now that her books are widely translated, she travels on promotional tours and speaks at literary festivals, including one in Mumbai, India. A fortuitously timed fellowship sends her to Paris for a nine-month residency. She moves into a barebones apartment in Montparnasse, which she calls her empty nest, and researches doppelgängers while working on her novel “” , about an Englishman who lives in the past and present simultaneously.
Not everyone celebrates her good fortune. At a literary party in London, an unpleasant “male writer of some note” tries to burst her balloon. “Do you sometimes look in the mirror and think all this success came rather late in the day and so much exposure is rather vulgar, a total bore and awfully fatiguing?” he asks snidely.
It’s Levy’s openness to the quirks and peccadilloes of others — including her best male friend, headed into his third divorce after a dalliance with a much younger woman — that makes Levy’s work so invigorating. She’s a prober, but not a heavy-handed one. On turning 60, she writes, “I was thinking about existence. And what it added up to.
Her prose is at once playful and multilayered. She offers fascinating glimpses into how her experiences sometimes work their way into her novel-in-progress. She also considers what drives her work: “I supposed that my literary purpose was to think freely, or rather for the books to speak freely on my behalf.” She adds, “The point of thinking is that it will always muddy the water.
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