AUGUST BLUE by Deborah Levy {reviewed by Stella}

August Blue by Deborah Levy {Reviewed by STELLA}
August Blue is an enigmatic novel. It’s sparsely written, with evocative sentences, yet crisp ideas. Elsa, a famous concert pianist, has walked off the stage in humiliation and is now traveling Europe teaching music to anyone who will have her. Her downfall extremely public; her inner world in turmoil. From the outset, Elsa would like you to believe she has a devil-may-care attitude towards her crisis, but it doesn’t take too much picking at a wound to see her hurt and confusion. But let’s put aside her parentage (or rather abandonment), let’s put aside her recently dyed blue hair, let’s put aside her craving to be free of expectation; for Levy does something from the outset — she sets a perpetual question mark at the centre of this story which underscores each page. Who is the woman in the Athens marketplace? Someone so familiar that the viewer and the viewed are compelled to see each other, to be drawn inexplicably to each other in spite of an enticing rivalry. Doppelganger or mirror image? Familiar or stranger? The same, but different, or not really there at all? A desire, all-consuming. Elsa is drawn to the woman who steals the mechanical horses from under her nose; whose acquisition sends her on an obsessive quest to have the horses as her right, and, when she can’t have them, stealing the woman’s hat is the next best thing to possess, as if possessing this hat binds the two strangers to each other. And maybe it does. Elsa’s flagrant wearing of the trilby is a flag to wave in provocation: Here I am, and you better not forget it — I’m coming for my horses. It’s 2020 and the pandemic is set to lock in. Elsa, back in London, finds a different pattern to live by — an enforced schedule, or non-schedule that will ring familiar to many. That strange time/non-time, of lengthening and shortening; a strange mix of frustration and contentment somehow co-existing, spiked with uncertainty. In August Blue, Levy uses this out-of-time moment in history to best effect in her novel about a woman in limbo. Moving between Greece, Paris, London, and Sardinia (where Elsa visits her maestro in his final months), Levy uses this movement to jointly discombobulate — reflecting Elsa’s fractured state as well as giving us, the reader, mere episodic moments with Elsa, as though we are allowed only glances into her life. In this novel, readers of Levy’s other novels will recognise the themes of mothers and daughters (Hot Milk), of heat as an oppressor as well as an escape (Swimming Home), and enigmatic actions (The Man Who Saw Everything) but will see a change in the telling. Levy seems to draw her memoir style (from her 'Living Autobiography' trilogy) into this novel, creating a fiction that has few boundaries — that impregnates itself into the reader with an ease that is beguiling, so that you are continually entering and re-entering the story, learning a little more each time, but nothing at all — yet paradoxically knowing everything, as if starting again is the only option towards understanding, if that is possible when facing oneself.