Hot Milk: Deborah Levy

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Be sure to enjoy language, experiment with ways of talking, be exuberant even when you don't feel like it because language can make your world a better place to live.” I’m also interested in the way that Colette’s father is portrayed. He seems to have one leg from a war injury, he is more intellectual than his wife, he’s wilder, and Colette writes about him fondly, but, somehow, he seems to be a peripheral player in this abundant rural childhood. Deborah Levy has a story, 'Weeping Machines', in the fourth issue of The White Review. You can buy it here. Deborah wrote and published her first novel BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS (Vintage), when she was 27 years old. The experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret, was so exhilarating, she wrote a few more. These include, SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY, THE UNLOVED (Vintage) and BILLY and GIRL (Bloomsbury). She has always written across a number of art forms (see Bookworks and Collaborations with visual artists) and was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991.

It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world, too. He had taken a risk when he invited her to join him at his table. After all, she came with a whole life and libido of her own. It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character. In this sense, she had unsettled a boundary, collapsed a social hierarchy, broken with the usual rituals. She could have stopped the story by describing the wonder of all she had seen in the deep calm sea before the storm. That would have been a happy ending, but she did not stop there. She was asking him (and herself) a question: do you think I was abandoned by that person on the boat? An exploration of sexuality, female rage, mother-daughter relationships, and, ultimately, finding one's own life... continuedRead with Gloucester Book Club. Can’t decide whether I liked this or not.... it didn’t provoke strong emotions in me but it’s undeniably a well written character study, and while our heroine is 25 years old, she seems emotionally delayed in her development. I would call Hot Milk a coming of age story with the colors of blue and white playing mainstage with stabs of bright yellow popping in. Blue, venomous snakes and starfish appear in this sexually symbolic drama where even names have meaning. While it is not noted in the book, I noticed that the mother is an English Rose and the Greek Orthodox father is called Christo. I think this author is much cleverer than we know, probably too clever for me to completely understand the symbolism. The title itself may well be emblematic of the female breast - Milk being the sustenance we all live off as infants, and for a mother-daughter tale, very appropriate. Frustrations simmer under the surface of relationships in this one, from the chained up dog on the beach to the human interaction between Sofia and her mother, her Greek family and her new friends. They are much like the jellyfish lurking in the sea and the inevitable stings are both physical and psychological. Through the opposing figures of mother and daughter, Deborah Levy explores the strange and monstrous nature of womanhood. Dreamlike and utterly compulsive, Hot Milk is a delirious fairy tale of feminine potency, a story both modern and timeless. In Deborah Levy's Hot Milk the main character, Sofia, spends time on the beach in Spain and is stung by jellyfish. The jellyfish, eerily beautiful yet often painful to humans, is one of a few creatures benefitting from global warming. Its numbers, which remained stable for a period, are now rising in many areas of the world.

Aristotle tells us that all politics starts in the family, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the infamously fraught relationship between mother and daughter. Here, the novelist, playwright and poet Deborah Levy chooses five books – or rather, four books and one film – that explore motherhood. Deborah wrote and published her first novel BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS (Vintage), when she was 27 years old. The experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret, was so exhilarating, she wrote a few more. These include, SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY, THE UNLOVED (Vintage) and BILLY and GIRL (Bloomsbury). Deborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their "intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination", including PAX, HERESIES for the Royal Shakespeare Company, CLAM, CALL BLUE JANE, SHINY NYLON, HONEY BABY MIDDLE ENGLAND, PUSHING THE PRINCE INTO DENMARK and MACBETH-FALSE MEMORIES, some of which are published in LEVY: PLAYS 1 (Methuen) That’s a question; it is not necessarily answered in stone. I look at it through myth too, in the way I show Sofia’s need to separate from that dynamic with her mother and make a life of her own. I explore this in my essay, Things I Don’t Want to Know, where I say it’s as if ‘mother’ is a delusion, and ‘the world loved the delusion more than it loved the mother’.

Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realise we don’t want to hold it together. In Levy’s hypnotic tale of female sexuality two women arrive in a village on the Spanish coast. Rose is suffering from a strange illness and her doctors are mystified. Her daughter Sofia has brought her here to find a cure with the celebrated and controversial Dr Gomez. Hot Milk frequently pans from the personal to the political. The waters of Almería’s beaches are infested with jellyfish, portentous refugees from a damaged ecosystem; Sophie ruminates on the conditions endured by local agricultural workers and the developing-world origins of various consumer goods; the privations of austerity economics are everywhere apparent. Indeed, the book’s preoccupation with kinship feels acutely relevant. In years to come, the profound societal impact of an ageing population will prompt more of us to reflect, like Sophie, on how a ‘wife can be a mother to her husband and a son can be a husband or a mother to his mother and a daughter can be a sister or a mother to her mother who can be a father and a mother to her daughter’.