photo : encountering beauty on Pohara beach. Population : 560
Deborah Levy. Real Estate, published in English in 2021, the third volume of the trilogy of her » living autobiography », as she calls it. I talked about the first volume elsewhere, and the second is not in the library at the moment. She takes stock of her life, close to her sixtieth birthday , as her daughters prepare to leave their London apartment. The English title emphasizes one part of the book, where she mentions her dream house. She wonders what is a home, or why, while she is a recognized author, translated into several languages, she still cannot afford to own a house, what she would like to find in it if she had one, where she would like it to be, etcetera. That was what intrigued me about this book, because it is a theme rarely discussed. However, the book is as much and perhaps even more a kind of daydreaming rather than a biography. A critic has said elsewhere that no one, better than Levy, knows how to talk about the everyday, essentially feminine, and that as such she describes what it means to be a woman and this is mainly what it is : a collection of her thoughts about her encounters, objects that are part of her life (shoes, among others), observations about strangers or neighbours, her friends, certain details of her daily life, her childhood memories, her mother and, ultimately, the female condition. The quality of the writing makes it worth reading, but because the English title promised me something else, I kind of lost interest because of the expectations I had. The French title fits much better with what is in the book, far from the idea of biography I had.
I then tried reading one of his novels, August Blue, but I took a dislike to the theme after a few pages and have given up for the moment. I will perhaps try The man who saw everything later, which was shortlisted (I think) for the Booker. And I hope that the library will soon bring in the second book of the trilogy, which will perhaps interest me more.