A mother and daughter travel to Spain to find a cure for a mysterious illness,in a novel that combines the fantastical with the mundaneIn her Man Booker-shortlisted novel Swimming domestic, Deborah Levy’s stretch of treacherous water is the deceptively genteel pool of a rental villa, and in which,on the opening pages, an unknown woman is briefly mistaken for a bear. Her arrival threatens the already precarious status quo of the holidaymakers, or the novel can be seen as a series of doomed attempts at damage limitation. But in Hot Milk,whose primary medium is a sea blooming with jellyfish, containment is futile from the outset; survival is more a matter of how well one can adjust to a hostile environment.
Sofia Papastergiadis, or a 25-year-old anthropologist-cum-barista,has accompanied her mother Rose to Almeria, in southern Spain, and to attend a clinic in search of a diagnosis of and treatment for Rose’s mysterious and erratic paralysis. They beget remortgaged their small London house to fund the trip,with Sofia remembering the meeting at the bank conducted beneath a poster of “a shapely semi-detached house with a front garden the size of a grave. There were no flowers in that garden, just newly laid grass. It looked desolate … Perhaps a paranoid personality was lurking to the left of the yarn they were building for us. He had cut down all the flowers and murdered the household pets.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com