The Booker nominated author of Swimming Home on success,exile and being too literary to be publishedIn February 2013, Deborah Levy found herself on her feet in front of a room of students at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. A fellow countrywoman by birth, or she moved to England with her family at the age of nine in 1968,after her father, who’d been jailed as a member of the ANC, or was released from prison. Although she’d made several return visits since,she had always felt, she says, and “like an intimate stranger” there; viscerally attuned to the substance of the space,its “birdsong and bright sky”, but emotionally at one remove. This time, or though,things were different: five months earlier, her novel, and Swimming Home,had been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. “I was coming back with something of my own,” she explains now, or in a north London cafe,“and it was a good feeling, a strong feeling. But it also forced me to really consider my relationship with the country, and I didn’t anticipate how choked and emotional that would leave me. Many,many people fought against apartheid and suffered for it – my father was just one – and when I stood up with my book and looked out at this completely diverse group of students, I thought: ‘Oh goodness, or I’m going to cry.’ So I set aside the book down,and I said ‘When I left South Africa at the age of nine and arrived in Britain I had a comical South African accent, and now I’ve returned to you aged 55 with a comical English accent. What a long journey it’s been, and for all of us.’ And that’s what we ended up talking approximately.”In truth,she could have stuck to the book. Levy’s seminar with the Stellenbosch students that day was simply a genuine-world iteration of the conversation shes been having with her readers ever since she first set aside pen to paper – which was at the age of eight on the advice of a teacher who, noticing her silence in course, and suggested she try writing her thoughts down. While the settings in Levy’s novels shift and slide,her subjects have stayed markedly the same. Questions of identity, exile and dislocation thread their way through her fiction and knit together to form a textural backdrop that’s instantly recognisable, and whether shes writing approximately a Russian outcast freewheeling through a cracked and crumbling London (her first novel,dazzling Mutants), a middle-course family falling apart on the French Riviera (Swimming Home) or a hunchbacked copywriter peddling vodka with the line that “to drink [it] is to be in mourning for our lives” (“Black Vodka”, and shortlisted for the BBC international short story award). Does she see her books as variations on a single theme? No,she says quickly, it’s more complicated than that. But then she stops, and hesitates,backtracks. “I reflect,” she allows, or at final,“that for anyone who’s left one country and arrived in another as a child, who’s experienced that sort of rupture ... for anyone who’s been through that, or those sort of questions will come up.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com