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Have you ever found an author that you just want to recommend to everyone you meet? The type of author that you just want to read over and over again. I found this author in 2012 and I am slowly working through her backlist. The first book I read of hers I loved so much […]

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I consider it a triumph every time I snare a sensational book and actually read it.

So consider me triumphed again—discovering Swimming Home by Deborah Levy in Philadelphia's Thirtieth Street Station bookstore (a tiny clutch of a space that has yet to fail my good-book greed) and reading it on the way to Penn and back, then in a fold of early morning hours.

This is the kind of book my friend Karen Rile will be able to explain to me, in full, when she reads it (she has ordered herself a copy). This is the kind of book I love—dangerously intelligent, smashed and dared, big themes on a small stage, more revealed by the brave elisions and planted repetitions, the near repetitions, than most authors can disclose declaratively. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker last year, but that's not why I bought it. I bought it because I stood in that bookstore at just past six in the morning, flipped through, and found lines like this:

Every moment with her was a kind of emergency, her words always too direct, too raw, too truthful.

And:

She was not ready to go home and start imitating someone she used to be.

And:

Her long thighs were joined to the jutting hinges of her hips like the legs of the dolls she used to bend and twist as a child.

The story is strange and seductive, its images bright.  There's the desire to read fast, to know how it all ends (for won't it end calamitously?), but you know you have to read it slow; you know you'll miss everything if you don't. It concerns two vacationing couples, an old villa in Nice, and a young woman named Kitty Finch, a naked anorectic with green painted fingernails and a hunch about nature who is desperate to have Joe, the philandering poet half of one of the couples, read a poem she wrote just for him. There is also a girl named Nina in the mix—Joe's daughter—who is trying (as the reader is trying) to make sense of the rich senselessness.

There is a mediation on the idea of et cetera. Et cetera!

All right. I'm done. Buy it. 

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A body in the swimming pool is always a good start. But this is no ordinary mystery story. And Kitty Finch is no ordinary body.

Her appearance at the tourist villa which the Jacobs have rented disturbs everyone – Joe, Isabel and their fourteen-year-old daughter, Nina, and their friends Mitchell and Laura. Jurgen, the German hippy caretaker, and their neighbour, Madeleine Sheridan, also feel the impact of her presence.

Kitty herself is an enigma. She is a copper-haired botanist with green fingernails; a poet; an attractive young woman who favours walking around naked; and a disturbed and disturbing presence.

Deborah Levy’s book is strange and unusual in its structure and its style. Her chapters are short, and their titles enigmatic: ‘Walls that open and close’, ‘Body Electric’, ‘Money is Hard’. We follow the events of each day of one week after the appearance of Kitty,  and Levy conveys the moods and thoughts of her characters through seemingly random remarks and actions. Each has their own problems and secrets, their own view of the world, and their own fears, desires and confusions. Each has their own particular response to Kitty. But nothing is spelled out and the tension mounts. The week begins and ends with a body in the swimming pool but the final chapter of the book is given to Nina – her memories and her dreaming conversations with her father.

This is a curious novel, full of psychological insight, but Tom MacCarthy’s ‘Afterword’, with its mention of Deborah Levy’s reading in Lacan, Deleuze, Barthes, Duras, Stein and Ballard risks making it seem like a dry academic exercise. His assessment of what he calls the “kaleidoscopic narrative” in this book adds more name-dropping confusion and is superfluous unless its readers are bent on deconstructing the text rather than enjoying a stimulating and interesting book.

Copyright © Ann Skea 2012
Website and Ted Hughes pages: http://ann.skea.com/

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Novelist Hilary Mantel has won the £50,000 (roughly $65,175) Man Booker Prize for Bring up the Bodies, the second time she has taken the award.

Follow the links below to read excerpts from all the authors on the longlist. “I merely wanted novels that they would not leave behind on a beach,” said judicial chair Sir Peter Stothard, leading a panel of judges that included Dinah Birch, Amanda Foreman, Dan Stevens and Bharat Tandon.

If you want more books, we made similar literary mixtapes linking to free samples of the 2012 National Book Award Finalists, 2012 Man Booker Longlist, the Best Science Fiction of the Year the Believer Book Award nominees, the 2012 Orwell Prize shortlist, the LA Times Book Prize winners, and the Best Business Books of the Year.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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