Deborah Levy

'Three bicycles. Seven ghosts. A crumbling apartment block on the hill. Fame. Tenderness. The statue of Peter Pan. Silk. Melancholy. The banana tree. A Pandemic. A love story.' From one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, comes the highly anticipated final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography' 'I can't think of any writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about what it is to be a woman' Observer on The Cost of Living Following the international critical acclaim of The Cost of Living, this final volume of Deborah Levy's 'Living Autobiography' is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it. 'I began to wonder what myself and all unwritten and unseen women would possess in their property portfolios at the end of their lives. Literally, her physical property and possessions, and then everything else she valued, though it might not be valued by society. What might she claim, own, discard and bequeath? Or is she the real estate, owned by patriarchy? In this sense, Real Estate is a tricky business. We rent it and buy it, sell and inherit it - but we must also knock it down.' 'Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy's every sentence is a masterpiece of clarity and poise... A brilliant writer' Daily Telegraph on The Cost of Living 'Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor-sharp insights' Financial Times on The Cost of Living

Real Estate

Laura Gill

What fascinating ways to think and see the world Deborah has.

BC Hark

 It was from writing with my fountain pen in bed, but I began to think of language itself as having its own bodily secretions: blood, sperm, faeces, tears, urine, sweat, spit. In the old days the ink would have been octopus ink, a literal bodily fluid, or even soot mixed with water and binders, but now it was made from synthetic dye. When I finally croaked and was mummified in silk, clay and various aromatics, I would add sooty ink to the mix, perhaps on my eyelids.

And we talked about a line by the Bengali philosopher, poet and composer Rabindranath Tagore:

It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.

I confessed to Vayu that I understood how it was difficult to be simple, every writer knows that to be true, but I did not really believe his line about happiness.

Seems like a must-read, given how much it was quoted in the book 3,4,5 times? 

If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of all the doors one would like to re-open, one would have to tell the story of one’s entire life.

As it happened, it was titled ‘I Have Dreamed So Much of You’.

I have dreamed so much of you that you are losing your reality.

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