Image from Amazon website.
A typically edgy, unsettled atmosphere pervades the latest novel by Deborah Levy, published in May this year. Set during the Covid pandemic, a young woman with a hugely successful career as a concert pianist, has an onstage breakdown and loses her nerve. As a former child prodigy, she’s been taken away from her mother to study with a great teacher, who acts as a father-substitute/mentor. The crisis leads her to dye her hair blue and to go on holiday to Greece to recover. She becomes obsessed with a woman she sees as her doppelganger and stalks her. But is the woman real or a symptom of her breakdown?
She frightened me. She was more knowing than I was. She made me feel less alone.
The novel is far from a comfortable read but, as with all Levy’s work, I found it intriguing. At the end, the reader is left with questions about how we bring up children, about our relationships with biological or surrogate parents and about the inevitability of loss, but potential recovery through creativity.
Ali Thurm 