Deborah Levy

“[August Blue] offers glimpses of Levy’s talent as a stylist. She can sketch a scene with a few precise brushstrokes and conjure emotion out of white space on the page.” —The New York Times A mesmerising novel on self-discovery from the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home If she was my double and I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was foolish? The air was electric between us, the way we transmitted our feelings to each other as they flowed through our arms, which were touching. At the height of her career, the piano virtuoso Elsa M. Anderson—former child prodigy, now in her thirties—walks off the stage in Vienna, midperformance. Now she is in Athens, watching an uncannily familiar woman purchase a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa wants the horses too, but there are no more for sale. She drifts to the ferry port, on the run from her talent and her history. So begins her journey across Europe, shadowed by the elusive woman who seems to be her double. A dazzling portrait of melancholy and metamorphosis, Deborah Levy’s August Blue uncovers the ways in which we attempt to revise our oldest stories and make ourselves anew.

A Novel

August Blue

Stas

When I was young, he always sat by my side when I played. Your fingers are asleep, he'd shout, what is the point of teaching a sleeper? At the same time my fingers were lively. Trembling. I didn't know how to be to please him.

I had no desire to scare my own students. 

Perhaps he was talking about my own early attempts at composition. It was as if he knew I could hear something that he did not understand, and resented it. As my fingers found the keys, I discovered that I had a point of view. All I had to do to tear it open was listen.

It seemed that Arthur was going to stay until the end, so she suggested he have a wash and blow-dry himself. The director of the salon, Rafael from Rotherhithe and Rio, as he described himself, was used to being discreet about the effort it took to raise the chair to get Arthur's head to reach the basin. The youngest intern suddenly arrived with three cushions. At last his head was in the basin. 

So, Marcus, we'll be finding a mechanic to figure out what's going on with our car, right? 

Steve upped the volume of his voice. As if speaking loudly would somehow wither the flamboyant plastic daisy on his child's shoe.

I made a note of the address while she started to talk about all the famous women who had committed suicide by drowning. There are vertical swimmners and horizontal swimmers she said. I myself have sometimes thought I will become a vertical swimmer. No one says I have to do the third act of my life. It is always nasty. If I become ill in old age, I have not ruled it out. 

Of course. No one rules it out. Ask anyone on this boulevard and they will tell you they have considered it. Pills. Rope. Gun. Weed- killer. Water. Jumping off high buldings.

You will agree, Elsa, that most of us don't go through with it, but we have at least walked our minds on this forbidden pasture and let them graze there?

That night I walked alone on the banks of the Seine. The moon and the stars were bright. I let the stars enter my body and realized I had become porous. Everything that I was had started to unravel. I was living precariously in my own body; that is to say, I had not fallen into who I was, or who I was becoming. What I wanted for myself was a new composition. I had let the woman who bought the horses enter me, too. 

I will make love with George Sand to get to get closer to Chopin, she said, sinking her teeth into the millefeuille.

On the way out, her mother asked me if I was happy with her daughter’s progress. 

Yes, I replied, she is very sensible and hard-working.

Fuck you, whores, he shouted, and then all the usual. We were queers, we were freaks, we were Jews, we were hags, we were ugly, we were mad. The same old composition. Eventually, red in the face, he slammed the door.

Yes, well, it's two condratictory thoughts, she said, the possibility of ending my life and wanting more life. So what? And here are two more condradictions: I don't believe in God, but I talk to something like God. I ask this presence to feel for me when I have cut down my own feelings.

August Blue quotes

Join the club