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Hot Milk: Deborah Levy

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It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world, too.

Early on I decided that if you told Joe you had a nose like a walnut he would tell you to go and see a doctor immediately.Freud’s statue is stolen from a park, so I must have thinking about the Freud statue outside Swiss Cottage Library. To be launching her debut as a director is a huge privilege, and Hot Milk fits perfectly alongside her incredible female driven body of work. I knew I had to do this from the very first sentence: ‘When Kitty finch took her hand off the steering wheel and told him she loved him, he no longer knew if she was threatening him or having a conversation. A little more than halfway through Deborah Levy’s hypnotic new novel, Hot Milk, its narrator, Sofia, throws a vase on the floor.

Jacques Testard is the publisher of Fitzcarraldo Editions and a founding editor of The White Review. Hot Milk is an exploration of filial and maternal love, memory and the reciprocal bonds of duty and obligation. And then something else: I like how Duras gets on with men, both in her fiction and film and in her life. Through the opposing figures of mother and daughter, Levy explores the strange and beguiling nature of womanhood and desire. You’ve chosen motherhood in literature as your theme; first of all, please can we talk a little about the mother in your new novel Hot Milk?To strip the wallpaper off the fairytale of The Family House in which the comfort and happiness of men and children has been the priority is to find behind it an unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted woman. BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. 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.

Take the tennis coach or ‘deviant messiah’, Bobby Crawford, in cocAine niGhTs who goes on all kinds of delinquent rampages in the bored bourgeois gated community in the Costa del Sol. I am so hopelessly in love with the spinning blades of Apollinaire’s poetry that he now has the gall to walk in to my writing without knocking on the door. And sometimes it works, most of the time it works, because I feel I have to start again, and re-find it, or find something else. Sofia understands that her mother’s wishes and hopes for herself have been dispersed in the winds and storms of a world not arranged to her advantage.Q The White Review—‘Yesterday, Lapinski, I stole a statue of Freud and carried him home and I danced for him, swinging my hips until they became paralysed. Most significantly of all, she mistakes a woman for a man in a toilet cubicle and is subsequently thrust into a strange, painful love affair with Ingrid Bauer, a seamstress in gladiator sandals who both pursues her and undermines her (“You should eat more salad”).

Her daughter Sofia has spent years playing the reluctant detective in this mystery, struggling to understand her mother's illness. One woman desiring another used to be thought monstrous, but in today's tourist Spain, Sofia can be as polyamorous as the Greek gods, making love with Juan too: "He was maternal, brotherly, he was like a sister, perhaps paternal, he had become my lover".She is accompanied by her daughter, Sophie, who is stuck in a mid-twenties rut, suffering from a holy trinity of career limbo, sexual confusion and unresolved issues regarding her estranged father. Sofia becomes obsessed with a German seamstress, Ingrid Bauer, “whose body is long and hard like an autobahn”, and who stitches her a shirt with the word “beloved” sewn into its fabric – unless, of course, she has embroidered another word entirely.

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