“Who is she, this mocking Madame Bovary, staring all day at her carpets? This Italian suburban supermodel, catwalking the white surgical aisles of hypermarkets in Frankfurt. Clasping soap powder and pâté to her beautiful breasts as if they were Oscars.”
– Deborah Levy, The Unloved
“‘There are days’, she says, ‘when I stare into the carpet. We have a lot of carpet in our house in Frankfurt because it is very big. I imported it from Rome. It is blue, the blue of the Mediterranean.’ She stops, as if to measure the effect of her words on the provincial Detective Inspctor. ‘There are days’, she repeats, ‘when I do nothing but stare into the carpet. There are places, near the television set for example, where the blue deepens and I am sucked, abducted, into its dark centre. I am an alien in my own home, floating through the hyperspace of one hundred per cent wool.'”
– Deborah Levy, The Unloved
“I realised that the question I had asked myself while writing this book [Swimming Home] was (as surgeons say) very close to the bone: ‘What do we do with knowledge that we cannot bear to live with? What do we do with the things we do not want to know?'”
– Deborah Levy, Things I don’t Want to Know
“I have never got a grip on when the past begins or where it ends, but if cities map the past with statues made from bronze forever frozen in one dignified position, as much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.”
– Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
“He asked her again to please, please, please drive him home to his wife and daughter.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely.'”
– Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
“It was impossible to believe that someone did not want to be saved from their incoherence.”
– Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
Deborah Levy, Interview by Mariella Frostrup, Open Book, BBC Radio 4 30 January 2014
Deborah Levy: After my father was arrested — along with Nelson Mandela and other family friends, who were fighting for human rights in the Apartheid era — I kept being asked to speak up at school. Speak louder, speaker louder — I was asked to repeat things all the time.
Mariella Frostrup: And that hadn’t happened before…
Deborah Levy: No. And so it wasn’t really that I’d become mute; I’d become very, very quiet. And I don’t think I wanted to speak — I was probably frightened about what my voice might sound like, because I was very sad. So, one day, in the playground, the school bully — who was a very tough Afrikaans girl, with white pointy teeth — asked me with uncharacteristic pity in her voice, “Are you dumb?” And I kind of shrugged because it wasn’t a yes or no answer. I was beginning to discover the power of silence, and I began to realise that what we don’t say is what really interests people. And that was an insight I was going to put to work later as a writer.
“I’m not sure where we land when we fall out of love.”
– Deborah Levy, “8 Questions for Deborah Levy,” Fleeting Magazine 22 December 2012
The wonderful Deborah Levy was kind enough to mention me in an interview with Matt Shoard for Fleeting Magazine (“8 Questions for Deborah Levy”) published on 22 December 2012. Here’s the relevant extract:
Are you comforted by the assertion that there are yet People on Earth who know what they are doing? Or, like me, do you subscribe to the notion that people who knew what they were doing began to die off about 1945 and are now on the brink of extinction?
Yes, Benjamin Eastham and Jacques Testard, editors of the stunning new Art Literature and Politics journal The White Review know what they are doing and they also know who they do not want to do business with. Andrew Gallix, writer and editor of 3:AM Magazine knows what he’s doing and I am so pleased he’s doing it. Uber publisher and translator Stefan Tobler at And Other Stories is a man of vision and steel; he knows what he’s doing in any number of languages. So does Matt Shoard of Fleeting and so does John Self, an incredibly astute reader and critic. Every generation throws up its new thinkers and they tend to make a cultural revolution. They have energy and purpose and sometimes wear really nice shoes. They make everyone else look exhausted and clapped out. That is how it should be.
He asked her again to please, please, please drive him safely home to his wife and daughter.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely.’
– Deborah Levy, Swimming Home, 2011
ANDREW GALLIX 