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August Blue
The mesmerising novel from the twice Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home.
'If she was my double and I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was foolish? That summer, the air was electric between us as we transmitted our feelings to each other across three countries.'
Elsa M. Anderson is a classical piano virtuoso. In a flea market in Athens, she watches an enigmatic woman buy two mechanical dancing horses. Is it possible that the woman who is so enchanted with the horses is her living double? Is she also looking for reasons to live?
Chasing their doubles across Europe, the two women grapple with their preconceived conceptions of the world and each other, culminating in a final encounter in a fateful summer rainstorm.
A vivid portrait of a long-held identity coming apart, August Blue expands our understanding of the ways in which we seek to find ourselves in others and create ourselves anew.
'If she was my double and I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was foolish? That summer, the air was electric between us as we transmitted our feelings to each other across three countries.'
Elsa M. Anderson is a classical piano virtuoso. In a flea market in Athens, she watches an enigmatic woman buy two mechanical dancing horses. Is it possible that the woman who is so enchanted with the horses is her living double? Is she also looking for reasons to live?
Chasing their doubles across Europe, the two women grapple with their preconceived conceptions of the world and each other, culminating in a final encounter in a fateful summer rainstorm.
A vivid portrait of a long-held identity coming apart, August Blue expands our understanding of the ways in which we seek to find ourselves in others and create ourselves anew.
Audiobook
First published May 4, 2023
About the author
Deborah Levy
60 books3,093 followersDeborah 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)
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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,352 reviews
June 26, 2023
4.5* rounded up
Some of my friends wrote that they couldn’t give this novel 5 stars when they compared it to her previous work. As August Blue is my first Deborah Levy, I do not have that problem so 5* it is.
Elsa M. Anderson is a burnout pianist, a former child prodigy who messes up a concert and then decides to give private lesson to children from different parts of Europe. While visiting a market in Athens, Elsa sees a woman who buys two wooden horses and f who she thinks is her living double. What? During her travels, she continue to meets that woman, who slowly become her obsession. Is that woman real or part of Elsa’ imagination?
This book is strange, an interesting blend of matter of fact prose and surreal moments. It is a novel full of metaphors, which are well hidden in apparently mundane details. The colour blue is the most obvious of them, a word which is also present in the title. The author writes about the blue sky, Elsa dyes her hair blue and I remember the colour coming up in various instances. Blue can be a colour of freedom but also of sadness of depression. The main character lives in the two states, switching between the two in her mind. The ending is also left to the reader’s interpretation. It is a book about identity, artists and their sacrifices, reality, love etc.
Why 4.5? The author based her characters on Frozen. Yes, you read that well. I wonder if she watched it too many times with her grandchildren( if she has them). The MC’s name is called Elsa Anderson, the blue hair, the name before being adopted by her teacher was Anna. I was half expecting Olaf to jump up from somewhere. Also, the novel was set during the pandemic and I still find it uncomfortable to read books about that period.
For sure I plan to read more (all?) Deborah Levy, so which one should I start next?
Some of my friends wrote that they couldn’t give this novel 5 stars when they compared it to her previous work. As August Blue is my first Deborah Levy, I do not have that problem so 5* it is.
Elsa M. Anderson is a burnout pianist, a former child prodigy who messes up a concert and then decides to give private lesson to children from different parts of Europe. While visiting a market in Athens, Elsa sees a woman who buys two wooden horses and f who she thinks is her living double. What? During her travels, she continue to meets that woman, who slowly become her obsession. Is that woman real or part of Elsa’ imagination?
This book is strange, an interesting blend of matter of fact prose and surreal moments. It is a novel full of metaphors, which are well hidden in apparently mundane details. The colour blue is the most obvious of them, a word which is also present in the title. The author writes about the blue sky, Elsa dyes her hair blue and I remember the colour coming up in various instances. Blue can be a colour of freedom but also of sadness of depression. The main character lives in the two states, switching between the two in her mind. The ending is also left to the reader’s interpretation. It is a book about identity, artists and their sacrifices, reality, love etc.
Why 4.5? The author based her characters on Frozen. Yes, you read that well. I wonder if she watched it too many times with her grandchildren( if she has them). The MC’s name is called Elsa Anderson, the blue hair, the name before being adopted by her teacher was Anna. I was half expecting Olaf to jump up from somewhere. Also, the novel was set during the pandemic and I still find it uncomfortable to read books about that period.
For sure I plan to read more (all?) Deborah Levy, so which one should I start next?
January 17, 2023
Okay, I'm officially baffled: Acclaimed experimental author Deborah Levy serves us a blue-haired, orphaned protagonist named Elsa (birth name: Anne) who struggles to let it go - is that super funny or super stupid? I'm still not sure (brain freeze). Disney allusions aside, I was intrigued by this story about an (allegedly) 34-year-old famous pianist who, at a concert in Vienna (capital of psychoanalysis, people!), suddenly diverts from the Rachmaninoff she is supposed to play, leading to public humiliation. After the incident, she travels through Europe, giving piano lessons (fun fact: Rachmaninoff himself had a depressive episode after one of his premieres went South, in this period he made a living giving piano lessons).
We meet Elsa after the Rach debacle in Greece, her blue hair an indicator of her trying to break free from the strict rules she had been subjected to since being a child prodigy: She was given up by her mother and lived with a foster family, when Arthur, an influential piano teacher adopted her and started further training her at six years old. But there is another layer to this: she also aims to prevent any resemblance to her unknown parents ("Blue was a separation from my DNA."). In Greece, Elsa sees a doppelgaenger buying a set of mechanical horses, and becomes obsessed with the women who she sees both as herself and her mother - and she wants to take the horses from her.
So classic Levy does her enigmatic metaphor stuff once again, and I'm here for it: The sea and the extraction of spines from sea animals play an important role (cue to Hot Milk and the painting August Blue by Henry Scott Tuke) as well as the central motif of artistic control and personal artistic expression. Elsa first diverts from the Rach, then becomes enchanted by Isadora Duncan, pioneer of modern dance who broke the rules of her time in order to find artistic freedom. The students she meets, a thirteen-year-old boy and a sixteen-year-old girl, also struggle with parental expectations and their own self-expression, as well as gender roles. At some point, Elsa needs to defend herself against a man from Dresden (a city particularly beloved by Rachmaninoff) to get her phone (a means to communicate) back.
Also, family is a central theme: Is (allegedly) 80-year-old (the timeline does not match up) Arthur, the piano teacher, a type of father, or was their relationship strictly professional? What rights does Arthur's long term gay lover have? What role does Elsa's biological mother play, for whom she searches in the doppelgaenger with the horses, in the doppelgaenger's trilby she found, in piano music? She sees the doppelgaenger in Athens, in London, in Paris, and many other shadows and echoes appear in names, events, characters. Much like in The Man Who Saw Everything, readers know that this is a case of shattered identity, or rather a woman who is confronted with the disparate parts of her identity that reveal themselves as separate, but connected. The pandemic raging around her, the faces hidden behind blue surgical masks Elsa sees everywhere heighten the sense of alienation.
Another artist the text mentions early on is relevant here: Agnès Varda, a pioneering feminist French director with a love for eccentric hairstyles (let me just say: two-tone bowl cuts). She moved away from traditional forms of storytelling in order to reflect her time and add social commentary. Elsa also looks for ways to tell her story not as her life-long training prescribes it, but in a manner she feels is truthful and authentic (hello, female gender roles and what they teach us all of our lives).
It's just a joy to puzzle over Levy's texts, and this narrative riddle, rendered in captivating, lyrical prose, is no exception.
We meet Elsa after the Rach debacle in Greece, her blue hair an indicator of her trying to break free from the strict rules she had been subjected to since being a child prodigy: She was given up by her mother and lived with a foster family, when Arthur, an influential piano teacher adopted her and started further training her at six years old. But there is another layer to this: she also aims to prevent any resemblance to her unknown parents ("Blue was a separation from my DNA."). In Greece, Elsa sees a doppelgaenger buying a set of mechanical horses, and becomes obsessed with the women who she sees both as herself and her mother - and she wants to take the horses from her.
So classic Levy does her enigmatic metaphor stuff once again, and I'm here for it: The sea and the extraction of spines from sea animals play an important role (cue to Hot Milk and the painting August Blue by Henry Scott Tuke) as well as the central motif of artistic control and personal artistic expression. Elsa first diverts from the Rach, then becomes enchanted by Isadora Duncan, pioneer of modern dance who broke the rules of her time in order to find artistic freedom. The students she meets, a thirteen-year-old boy and a sixteen-year-old girl, also struggle with parental expectations and their own self-expression, as well as gender roles. At some point, Elsa needs to defend herself against a man from Dresden (a city particularly beloved by Rachmaninoff) to get her phone (a means to communicate) back.
Also, family is a central theme: Is (allegedly) 80-year-old (the timeline does not match up) Arthur, the piano teacher, a type of father, or was their relationship strictly professional? What rights does Arthur's long term gay lover have? What role does Elsa's biological mother play, for whom she searches in the doppelgaenger with the horses, in the doppelgaenger's trilby she found, in piano music? She sees the doppelgaenger in Athens, in London, in Paris, and many other shadows and echoes appear in names, events, characters. Much like in The Man Who Saw Everything, readers know that this is a case of shattered identity, or rather a woman who is confronted with the disparate parts of her identity that reveal themselves as separate, but connected. The pandemic raging around her, the faces hidden behind blue surgical masks Elsa sees everywhere heighten the sense of alienation.
Another artist the text mentions early on is relevant here: Agnès Varda, a pioneering feminist French director with a love for eccentric hairstyles (let me just say: two-tone bowl cuts). She moved away from traditional forms of storytelling in order to reflect her time and add social commentary. Elsa also looks for ways to tell her story not as her life-long training prescribes it, but in a manner she feels is truthful and authentic (hello, female gender roles and what they teach us all of our lives).
It's just a joy to puzzle over Levy's texts, and this narrative riddle, rendered in captivating, lyrical prose, is no exception.
July 4, 2023
There’s a touch of madness to Levy’s latest. In the opening pages, we meet a disgraced former child prodigy, a pianist, wandering the streets of Athens. We follow her in pursuit of a doppelgänger, hopping around Europe and perhaps reality itself. We have hints that not all is right in the world, time and identity fractured. Levy provides a host of clues: unstable markers of identity, a questionable COVID-era sequence of events, a mysterious mentor / surrogate-father who is preternaturally aging away in Sardinia. The prose is sly, as the book really shines on the sentence level. We get a bevy of allusions, from classical composers to Isadora Duncan to Agnès Varda to Josephine Baker and others. An engagement with these artists, from Rachmaninov and Mozart on down the line, adds a further layer of interest. I can understand reviews that highlight the ways this doesn’t quite cohere. That’s a fair take, but I don’t think the pieces are meant to fit. Living in a world awash with overwritten prose, it’s refreshing to see a book where timelines are whimsically inconsistent and loose ends are unafraid to remain loose ends. Many thanks to the US publisher, FSG, for approving a digital ARC via Netgalley.
July 14, 2023
August Blue by Deborah Levy is a Literary Fiction Story!
At the pinnacle of her career, a former child prodigy, Elsa M. Anderson, now a thirty-four-year-old classical piano virtuosos, walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance.
Elsa disappear into Europe, roaming from port to port, and soon believes she's being shadowed by a woman who looks exactly like her...
August Blue is mysterious, thought-provoking, intense, and a deeply personal reflection of the main character Elsa. As I listened to this story, I grew increasingly curious as to where this author was taking me. Her writing is mesmerizing, it pulls you in, makes you feel like you're with Elsa on her journey.
August Blue is the first Deborah Levy book I've read and it has been a lesson in what her storytelling entails. Her work is full of metaphors, the most obvious in this one is the color 'blue' which appears in the title and repetitively throughout the chapters. It's the color of sky and ocean, signifying freedom and independence but could also be a reference to sadness and depression and all of these are reflected in this story. There are more metaphors, lots more and discovering them as you read seems to be part of the Deborah Levy experience.
Listening to August Blue narrated by Alix Dunmore is an enjoyable experience and her voicing is a perfect fit for this story.
I believe Deborah Levy to be an author who allows her readers to draw their own conclusions about each of her stories. There's nothing neat and tidy about August Blue and all Levy books, I'm told, are a bit of a puzzle. Well, I'm all in!
4.25⭐ and I highly recommend to those who enjoy hidden metaphors within their Literary Fiction reads!
Thank you to NetGalley, Macmillan Audio, and Deborah Levy for an ALC of this book. It has been an honor to give my honest and voluntary review.
At the pinnacle of her career, a former child prodigy, Elsa M. Anderson, now a thirty-four-year-old classical piano virtuosos, walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance.
Elsa disappear into Europe, roaming from port to port, and soon believes she's being shadowed by a woman who looks exactly like her...
August Blue is mysterious, thought-provoking, intense, and a deeply personal reflection of the main character Elsa. As I listened to this story, I grew increasingly curious as to where this author was taking me. Her writing is mesmerizing, it pulls you in, makes you feel like you're with Elsa on her journey.
August Blue is the first Deborah Levy book I've read and it has been a lesson in what her storytelling entails. Her work is full of metaphors, the most obvious in this one is the color 'blue' which appears in the title and repetitively throughout the chapters. It's the color of sky and ocean, signifying freedom and independence but could also be a reference to sadness and depression and all of these are reflected in this story. There are more metaphors, lots more and discovering them as you read seems to be part of the Deborah Levy experience.
Listening to August Blue narrated by Alix Dunmore is an enjoyable experience and her voicing is a perfect fit for this story.
I believe Deborah Levy to be an author who allows her readers to draw their own conclusions about each of her stories. There's nothing neat and tidy about August Blue and all Levy books, I'm told, are a bit of a puzzle. Well, I'm all in!
4.25⭐ and I highly recommend to those who enjoy hidden metaphors within their Literary Fiction reads!
Thank you to NetGalley, Macmillan Audio, and Deborah Levy for an ALC of this book. It has been an honor to give my honest and voluntary review.
December 8, 2023
In my twenties, I roomed with a woman who danced in the musical, Cat’s. For six nights and three days a week she gave body and soul to that job, returning home exhausted. During a stunt in which her Cat’s partner hung her upside-down by her ankles, waited for her to latch onto his ankles, and then lunged into a rolling series of cartwheels, they rolled off the stage. In that moment, my friend tore her knee to the destruction of her career.
I thought of this while reading August Blue, how my friend made it onto Broadway after years of obsessive drive, yet during a single performance shattered her identity. Elsa, our August Blue narrator, is a renowned pianist, and while performing Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto, was overtaken by her own creative riff. Elsa, too, felt a sudden loss of ground previously supplied by a highly controlled identity. Like my friend, Elsa was an obsessive child striving to be the best in a competition between herself and her ideals. And in both cases, the final motion felt like an unconscious refusal to be inauthentic, the need for a new composition of the internal self.
The loss of identity is what gives August Blue its psychological slant, literally tilting our balance. Elsa becomes obsessed with a woman she sees in a store in the first chapter of the book. This is shortly after the lockdown and the woman is wearing a mask, which allows Elsa to imagine she sees her all over Europe as she travels. The woman serves as an alter ego, a new way to live, and Elsa lets that freedom inhabit her.
When Elsa was 6-years-old, her teacher, Albert Goldstein, adopted her from foster care and shaped her on a daily basis to be the renowned pianist she becomes. And Elsa was driven towards fame by the raw longing to find her mother. She’d never thought of Albert as her father, yet he raised her. When we meet Elsa, Albert has moved away to spend the last days of his life in comfort. The strangeness of this relationship is the entire context in which Elsa grapples, not understanding her attachment or responsibility to this man. In this novel, creativity is described as flight, yet Elsa cannot land. Her musical outburst reads like a surge of freedom from the public box Albert put her in. At some point in our lives, we all experience the loss of an authority figure, leaving us grasping at lost ground.
In the fabulous Deborah Levy way, this book blurs the lines between reality and illusion, leaving her readers in the in-between. In Hot Milk, this felt more to me like an all-pervading mist, whereas here it was more like clarity suddenly reflected by two facing mirrors. This was my favorite Levy due to this sharpness. The lucid language pierced human veils in a way that reminded me of Rachel Cusk’s trilogy. (In August Blue, the protagonist also travels to Athens to teach, and she, too, is a single woman recently unmoored).
In another way this reminded me of Marguerite Duras’, The Lover, not just in efficiency of language, but also in how that language is visually arranged on the
page into small sections separated by lots of space. Both are page-hugging reads to savor, yet could be read in a day. The visual space in August Blue spotlights a few repeating words, and there’s something comforting in this repetition, a strange anchoring during unstable moments. But where Cusk feels removed, and Duras emotionally self-absorbed, Levy strikes a perfect balance.
Being an artist isn’t a choice. It’s living with an innate drive for freedom that doesn’t fit easily into this world. Even a renowned and respected artist has very much performed for her public. The artist is dependent on them. Part of the drive when putting a creative work out there is the desire to connect to something deeper inside us, beneath all the noise. You want to bring yourself there by the act of creation, and you want others to experience what you feel is possible. But too often, compromises must be made.
Buddy read with Lisa, here is her review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I thought of this while reading August Blue, how my friend made it onto Broadway after years of obsessive drive, yet during a single performance shattered her identity. Elsa, our August Blue narrator, is a renowned pianist, and while performing Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto, was overtaken by her own creative riff. Elsa, too, felt a sudden loss of ground previously supplied by a highly controlled identity. Like my friend, Elsa was an obsessive child striving to be the best in a competition between herself and her ideals. And in both cases, the final motion felt like an unconscious refusal to be inauthentic, the need for a new composition of the internal self.
The loss of identity is what gives August Blue its psychological slant, literally tilting our balance. Elsa becomes obsessed with a woman she sees in a store in the first chapter of the book. This is shortly after the lockdown and the woman is wearing a mask, which allows Elsa to imagine she sees her all over Europe as she travels. The woman serves as an alter ego, a new way to live, and Elsa lets that freedom inhabit her.
When Elsa was 6-years-old, her teacher, Albert Goldstein, adopted her from foster care and shaped her on a daily basis to be the renowned pianist she becomes. And Elsa was driven towards fame by the raw longing to find her mother. She’d never thought of Albert as her father, yet he raised her. When we meet Elsa, Albert has moved away to spend the last days of his life in comfort. The strangeness of this relationship is the entire context in which Elsa grapples, not understanding her attachment or responsibility to this man. In this novel, creativity is described as flight, yet Elsa cannot land. Her musical outburst reads like a surge of freedom from the public box Albert put her in. At some point in our lives, we all experience the loss of an authority figure, leaving us grasping at lost ground.
In the fabulous Deborah Levy way, this book blurs the lines between reality and illusion, leaving her readers in the in-between. In Hot Milk, this felt more to me like an all-pervading mist, whereas here it was more like clarity suddenly reflected by two facing mirrors. This was my favorite Levy due to this sharpness. The lucid language pierced human veils in a way that reminded me of Rachel Cusk’s trilogy. (In August Blue, the protagonist also travels to Athens to teach, and she, too, is a single woman recently unmoored).
In another way this reminded me of Marguerite Duras’, The Lover, not just in efficiency of language, but also in how that language is visually arranged on the
page into small sections separated by lots of space. Both are page-hugging reads to savor, yet could be read in a day. The visual space in August Blue spotlights a few repeating words, and there’s something comforting in this repetition, a strange anchoring during unstable moments. But where Cusk feels removed, and Duras emotionally self-absorbed, Levy strikes a perfect balance.
Being an artist isn’t a choice. It’s living with an innate drive for freedom that doesn’t fit easily into this world. Even a renowned and respected artist has very much performed for her public. The artist is dependent on them. Part of the drive when putting a creative work out there is the desire to connect to something deeper inside us, beneath all the noise. You want to bring yourself there by the act of creation, and you want others to experience what you feel is possible. But too often, compromises must be made.
Buddy read with Lisa, here is her review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
July 17, 2023
Well, it's Levy, so I am somewhat predisposed to love it. I have read virtually everything she's published (even obscure novelty items like Diary of a Steak and An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell) - except, inexplicably enough, her plays (since that's my field) - which I just find incomprehensible on any level. She's perhaps my favorite contemporary literary author; she is certainly in the top three.
So I was genuinely ecstatic for her first new novel since her 2019 Booker-nominated The Man Who Saw Everything (... still disgruntled it did not win! Especially over Atwood's retread and the dreadful Evaristo!). And Ms. Levy has not disappointed. This new novel seems a logical extension of the themes of identity, time, memory and life purpose that constituted those of the earlier book. But even though that book was a flat-out masterpiece - this might even top it.
I raced through the book in a day (it's short, and can easily be read in 3-4 hours), so will definitely go back and reread soon to pick up on what I might have missed - Levy is one author who almost demands multiple readings. And it's just so much FUN - and intellectual exercise - to 'connect the dots'.
As with all Levy, the book is enigmatic and defies categorization. Suffice it to say that this concerns a 34-year-old world famous pianist, who becomes disoriented playing a Rachmaninoff concerto in Vienna, stops performing, dyes her hair blue (one of the many allusions of the title) ... and spends the next year (in the early times of the Covid pandemic and masking) giving piano lessons in foreign lands - where she continually runs into a mysterious woman who she feels is her double. This all seems somewhat reminiscent of the Bergman film 'Persona' - but there MIGHT also be allusions to the more recent Disney classic 'Frozen' - the adopted pianist is known as Elsa M. Anderson (as in Hans Christion, the author of the original story?), but her original birth name was Ann (i.e., a variation of Anna, as in the other main character in the film).
What does this all mean or add up to? - well, the main thing I LOVE about Levy is that she doesn't bludgeon her audience with easy answers or neat, tidy summations. Each reader will bring their own baggage and prejudices to a reading of this - and if the Booker committee doesn't see fit to at least put this on 2023's longlist, I'm leading the protest!
My profuse gratitude to FS&G and Netgalley for allowing me the privilege of reading this ARC a full 6.5 months prior to publication! Kudos for one of the coolest book covers in a long time also!
Sidenote/fun fact: I am also crazy-happy that Levy's Hot Milk is even as I speak being turned into a film starring the luminous Jessie Buckley and national treasure Fiona Shaw. Can. Not. Wait. [PS: Sadly, Buckley had to drop out of the film due to scheduling conflicts - allegedly because she will be the lead in the film version of [book:Hamnet|43890641], which is almost as exciting - and has been replaced by Emma Mackey - who I am not that familiar with. The film will undoubtedly be delayed anyway, due to the writer and actor strikes).
So I was genuinely ecstatic for her first new novel since her 2019 Booker-nominated The Man Who Saw Everything (... still disgruntled it did not win! Especially over Atwood's retread and the dreadful Evaristo!). And Ms. Levy has not disappointed. This new novel seems a logical extension of the themes of identity, time, memory and life purpose that constituted those of the earlier book. But even though that book was a flat-out masterpiece - this might even top it.
I raced through the book in a day (it's short, and can easily be read in 3-4 hours), so will definitely go back and reread soon to pick up on what I might have missed - Levy is one author who almost demands multiple readings. And it's just so much FUN - and intellectual exercise - to 'connect the dots'.
As with all Levy, the book is enigmatic and defies categorization. Suffice it to say that this concerns a 34-year-old world famous pianist, who becomes disoriented playing a Rachmaninoff concerto in Vienna, stops performing, dyes her hair blue (one of the many allusions of the title) ... and spends the next year (in the early times of the Covid pandemic and masking) giving piano lessons in foreign lands - where she continually runs into a mysterious woman who she feels is her double. This all seems somewhat reminiscent of the Bergman film 'Persona' - but there MIGHT also be allusions to the more recent Disney classic 'Frozen' - the adopted pianist is known as Elsa M. Anderson (as in Hans Christion, the author of the original story?), but her original birth name was Ann (i.e., a variation of Anna, as in the other main character in the film).
What does this all mean or add up to? - well, the main thing I LOVE about Levy is that she doesn't bludgeon her audience with easy answers or neat, tidy summations. Each reader will bring their own baggage and prejudices to a reading of this - and if the Booker committee doesn't see fit to at least put this on 2023's longlist, I'm leading the protest!
My profuse gratitude to FS&G and Netgalley for allowing me the privilege of reading this ARC a full 6.5 months prior to publication! Kudos for one of the coolest book covers in a long time also!
Sidenote/fun fact: I am also crazy-happy that Levy's Hot Milk is even as I speak being turned into a film starring the luminous Jessie Buckley and national treasure Fiona Shaw. Can. Not. Wait. [PS: Sadly, Buckley had to drop out of the film due to scheduling conflicts - allegedly because she will be the lead in the film version of [book:Hamnet|43890641], which is almost as exciting - and has been replaced by Emma Mackey - who I am not that familiar with. The film will undoubtedly be delayed anyway, due to the writer and actor strikes).
June 22, 2023
For sure, I enjoyed Deborah Levy’s newest novel. But that’s the only thing I’m sure about when it comes to August Blue.
Levy’s short tale is for those who love classical music, as it follows a piano virtuoso by the name of Elsa M. Anderson. After botching a performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in Vienna, Elsa sees her double, a doppelganger, buying mechanical horses at a market in Athens. The encounter sets off a journey across Europe where Elsa continues to cross paths with the mysterious woman at the oddest of times.
Is Elsa mad and hallucinating? Depressed? Or is her relay of the events accurate? The story is so dreamlike in its telling, so blurred and fuzzy that it could be all, one, some, or none of the above. (I have thoughts, of course. I’m just unable to share them here.)
Be assured that Levy’s obscurity is intentional. She wants readers to draw their own conclusion, to interpret the story in an individual way. And I liked the novel for this reason – it’s refreshing to not always have my hand held while reading.
There’s a lot about August Blue that went over my head, though. The metaphors – I know I didn’t catch them all. But I caught enough to know that Levy’s latest is an intelligent work of fiction. Her prose is spare and lovely, every sentence purposeful, every word chosen with care.
No matter that I have lingering questions. That’s what rereads are for.
My sincerest appreciation to Deborah Levy, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley for the digital review copy. All opinions included herein are my own.
Levy’s short tale is for those who love classical music, as it follows a piano virtuoso by the name of Elsa M. Anderson. After botching a performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in Vienna, Elsa sees her double, a doppelganger, buying mechanical horses at a market in Athens. The encounter sets off a journey across Europe where Elsa continues to cross paths with the mysterious woman at the oddest of times.
Is Elsa mad and hallucinating? Depressed? Or is her relay of the events accurate? The story is so dreamlike in its telling, so blurred and fuzzy that it could be all, one, some, or none of the above. (I have thoughts, of course. I’m just unable to share them here.)
Be assured that Levy’s obscurity is intentional. She wants readers to draw their own conclusion, to interpret the story in an individual way. And I liked the novel for this reason – it’s refreshing to not always have my hand held while reading.
There’s a lot about August Blue that went over my head, though. The metaphors – I know I didn’t catch them all. But I caught enough to know that Levy’s latest is an intelligent work of fiction. Her prose is spare and lovely, every sentence purposeful, every word chosen with care.
No matter that I have lingering questions. That’s what rereads are for.
My sincerest appreciation to Deborah Levy, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley for the digital review copy. All opinions included herein are my own.
December 23, 2022
As much as I love Levy's writing and her outstanding 'living autobiography' volumes, I struggled somewhat with this. As usual, there's much of interest here, not least the fact that the central character is a famous pianist - but it's hard to see how the vision of the book coheres.
There's doubling and shadowing, something that literature has been dealing with forever though here it's not a Gothic doppelganger sort of mirroring, and is something more identity-splitting and opaque. The technique of embedded symbols (a pair of horses, say) worked better for me in The Man Who Saw Everything where images shifted and operated like emotional bombshells.
I was left by the end as puzzled as I was entertained - but I miss the more direct and funny Levy from the memoirs.
Thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley
There's doubling and shadowing, something that literature has been dealing with forever though here it's not a Gothic doppelganger sort of mirroring, and is something more identity-splitting and opaque. The technique of embedded symbols (a pair of horses, say) worked better for me in The Man Who Saw Everything where images shifted and operated like emotional bombshells.
I was left by the end as puzzled as I was entertained - but I miss the more direct and funny Levy from the memoirs.
Thanks to the publisher for an ARC via NetGalley
August 27, 2023
It occurred to me that what I had transmitted to her, across four countries, was pain. We were all striding out into the world once again to infect and be infected by each other. If she was my double and I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was foolish? The air was electric between us, the way we transmitted our feelings to each other as they flowed through our arms, which were touching. We agreed that whatever happened next in the world, we would still rub conditioner into our hair after we washed it and comb it through to the ends, we would soften our lips with rose-, strawberry-and cherryscented balm, and though we would be interested to see a wolf perched in a lonely mountain, we liked our household animals to betray their savage nature and live with us in our reality, which was not theirs. They would lie in our laps and let us stroke them through waves of virus, wars, drought and floods and we would try not to transmit our fear to them.
August Blue begins in September*, during the pandemic. with the first-person narrator watching a woman at a market stall in Greece buying a mechanical horse (* see 1) below):
I first saw her in a flea market in Athens buying two mechanical dancing horses.
...
She was wearing a black felt trilby hat. I couldn’t see much of her face because the blue clinical mask we were obliged to wear.at this time was stretched over her mouth and nose. Standing with her was an elderly man, perhaps eighty years old. He did not respond to the horses with delight, as she was doing. Her body was animated, tall and lively as she pulled the strings upwards and outwards. Her companion was still, stooped and silent.
...
She seemed to be about my age, thirty-four, and like me she was wearing a tightly belted green raincoat. It was almost identical to mine, except hers had three gold buttons sewn on to the cuffs. We obviously wanted the same things. My startling thought at that moment was that she and I were the same person. She was me and I was her. Perhaps she was a little more than I was. I sensed she had known I was standing nearby and that she was taunting me.
Elsa approaches the stall to attempt to buy a similar pair of horses, only to find they were the last pair. She goes it pursuit of the woman, failing to find her, but finding her trilby hat, which Elsa promptly wears herself, reasoning that she has the woman's hat and the woman has the horses she wants, so perhaps they can swap at some stage.
The Travelling Companions by Augustus Leopold Egg which Levy has said partly inspired the 'doppelgangers' feature of this novel:
The narrator, Elsa, a famous English concert pianist, then introduces herself to us by what her friends know about her (which suggests there may be other things she isn't telling them, or us):
They knew I was a child prodigy and they knew how my foster-parents gifted me, age six, to Arthur Goldstein, who adopted me so I could become a resident pupil at his music school. I had been moved from a humble house near Ipswich in Suffolk to a grander house in Richmond, London. They knew about my audition and then scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, they knew about the international prizes and Carnegie Hall, the recordings of recital work and piano concertos under the baton of the greatest conductors, most recently, and fatally, in the Golden Hall in Vienna. They knew about my acclaimed interpretations of Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Ravel, Schumann, and they knew I had lost my nerve and was making mistakes. They knew I was now thirty-four. No lovers. No children.
The "fatal" concert in Vienna, a performance of Rachmaninov, accompanied by an orchestra took place the previous month. Before then her identity seemed to becoming unmoored:
A week before the Rachmaninov concert I had decided to dye my hair blue. Arthur tried to dissuade me. After all, my long brown hair, always plaited and coiled around my head, was my signature look. Elsa M. Anderson, the piano virtuoso who in some ways resembled a prima ballerina.
The concert itself was to end in farce, when Elsa found herself incapable (mentally, not technically) of playing the 'Rach' piece and played her own composition instead while the orchestra ploughed on with the original. Elsa has now stopped playing the piano professionally, instead teaching piano privately to the children of the internationally well-off, and Arthur, her teacher and mentor, has moved to his Sardinian second home, where her friends joke he perhaps has a lover:
They had meant it as a joke because he was now eighty. I never knew anything about his romantic life. I had not once seen Arthur with a partner, though I suspected he had his own arrangements. He was forty-six when he adopted me, so maybe the most inflamed parts of his libido had been tamed.
That's all in the opening pages of the novel - but the attentive reader of the above paragraph will immediately notice something is off (see 2) below).
Elsa is in Greece for one such set of lessons and in the novel she returns to England, then goes to Paris for another such series of lessons, back to England and then to Sardinia to visit the ailing Arthur, the story taking place over a year until the following August. Throughout it all Elsa wears the trilby hat, and keeps encountering, or thinks she encounters, the woman, her double. And she wrestles with what happened in the Viennese concert and also her own identity, including that of her birth mother, of which she has hitherto been uncurious.
The lessons of Levy's previous novel The Man Who Saw Everything is that what seemed like continuity errors were actually deliberate (if not necessarily explained) on the author's behalf, and this novel left me with a number of such questions, including:
1) Elsa's Covid vaccine
I believe the novel starts in September 2021, rather than September 2020, given the various aspects of the Covid timeline, although one could make a case for either. But Elsa receives her first Covid vaccine in France in November, with the pharmacist commenting that we will make a little piece of history. The first vaccinations in France, of the elderly, took place in late December 2020 (other than trials) but by November 2021, vaccination was routine, most of the UK population would have been double-vaccinated and the booster campaign was beginning.
2) the mystery of Arthur's age
Elsa is adopted by Arthur when she is 6 and she is now 34. He was 46 when he adopted her. That makes him around 74 now. But on three separate times (and by Elsa, and another character) we are told Arthur is 80, so he has aged 34 years while she has aged 28.
To add to the sense this is deliberate that he is 80 is mentioned three separate times (he’s very fit for a man of eighty Elsa tells someone in London, and Arthur looked after you since you were a child and now he is eighty is played back to her by Arthur's companion in Sardinia), so that the reader cannot really miss the anomaly. But them Elsa also tells another friend, almost gratuitously, He was born in 1946 after all, which is instead consistent with the correct age.
[Post review addition - disappointingly at least one of these discrepancies has been corrected in the final version - “He was fifty-two when he adopted me” - disappointing as this was then purely a mistake, not a sign of something more intriguing]
And connecting both of the above there is a sense of time slippage in the novel associated with the three time zones of GMT (London), GMT+1 (Paris, Sardinia) and GMT+2 (Greece), but with an odd error - five in Poros would be three not nine in London:
For some reason my laptop would not let me change UK time to Greek time, so I had to keep adding two hours to British time. If it was five in the afternoon in Poros, it was seven in the evening in London. This bending of time, backwards and forwards, added to the unreality of being in Greece after the long lockdown.
(Again another Goodreader suggests this may have been corrected)
3) the novel's title, August Blue.
Elsa died her hair blue in a concert in August - hence August blue. But Levy would be aware of other resonances so what is the connection with the poem The Sundew by Algernon Charles Swinburne and the associated painting August Blue by Henry Scott Tuke?
4) the link to Frozen
If you call a character, who has lost her birth parents, Elsa and associate her with the colour blue, (and h/t to Doug, have her surname as Anderson, as in Hans-Christian Anderson of The Snow Queen fame) then you must be making a nod to the greatest movie of the 21st century.
But what does Levy want us to take from this - was the 'fatal' concert Elsa letting it go?
5) the novel's epigraph "Even our shadows are in love when we walk"
This is taken from the closing words of My Mother Laughs, Daniella Shreir's translation of Chantal Akerman's original Ma mère rit (disappointingly the translator isn't credited in the novel), which records the decline of the film director's mother.
But who is the reference to in the context of this novel - Elsa and her doppelganger, Elsa and Arthur, her near life-long companion, or Elsa and her unknown (to her) birth mother? The previous line in My Mother Laughs reads, We loved each other, we went our separate ways, I don't remember why, and now we love each other, and on Akerman's book, in the words of The Arts Desk "Although the book is an elegy for her mother, it is Akerman’s own obituary.".
Overall, this is an intriguing work, but I was left with more questions than answers. And while beautiful at the sentence level, There are lots of parts of the novel (an Isadora Duncan thread, the Covid parts particularly the mask references, the tutorees) that while adding to the atmosphere don't seem to really fit together. The final confrontation between Elsa and the double was also rather anti-climatic.
3.5 stars rounded to 3 for now but I can see this becoming 4 as the novel is published and other readers (and interviews with the author) fill in some of the gaps.
Addition: Lisa in the comments below shows wonderfully how these different elements in the paragraph two above do combine so have upgraded to 4 stars
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC
August Blue begins in September*, during the pandemic. with the first-person narrator watching a woman at a market stall in Greece buying a mechanical horse (* see 1) below):
I first saw her in a flea market in Athens buying two mechanical dancing horses.
...
She was wearing a black felt trilby hat. I couldn’t see much of her face because the blue clinical mask we were obliged to wear.at this time was stretched over her mouth and nose. Standing with her was an elderly man, perhaps eighty years old. He did not respond to the horses with delight, as she was doing. Her body was animated, tall and lively as she pulled the strings upwards and outwards. Her companion was still, stooped and silent.
...
She seemed to be about my age, thirty-four, and like me she was wearing a tightly belted green raincoat. It was almost identical to mine, except hers had three gold buttons sewn on to the cuffs. We obviously wanted the same things. My startling thought at that moment was that she and I were the same person. She was me and I was her. Perhaps she was a little more than I was. I sensed she had known I was standing nearby and that she was taunting me.
Elsa approaches the stall to attempt to buy a similar pair of horses, only to find they were the last pair. She goes it pursuit of the woman, failing to find her, but finding her trilby hat, which Elsa promptly wears herself, reasoning that she has the woman's hat and the woman has the horses she wants, so perhaps they can swap at some stage.
The Travelling Companions by Augustus Leopold Egg which Levy has said partly inspired the 'doppelgangers' feature of this novel:
The narrator, Elsa, a famous English concert pianist, then introduces herself to us by what her friends know about her (which suggests there may be other things she isn't telling them, or us):
They knew I was a child prodigy and they knew how my foster-parents gifted me, age six, to Arthur Goldstein, who adopted me so I could become a resident pupil at his music school. I had been moved from a humble house near Ipswich in Suffolk to a grander house in Richmond, London. They knew about my audition and then scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, they knew about the international prizes and Carnegie Hall, the recordings of recital work and piano concertos under the baton of the greatest conductors, most recently, and fatally, in the Golden Hall in Vienna. They knew about my acclaimed interpretations of Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, Ravel, Schumann, and they knew I had lost my nerve and was making mistakes. They knew I was now thirty-four. No lovers. No children.
The "fatal" concert in Vienna, a performance of Rachmaninov, accompanied by an orchestra took place the previous month. Before then her identity seemed to becoming unmoored:
A week before the Rachmaninov concert I had decided to dye my hair blue. Arthur tried to dissuade me. After all, my long brown hair, always plaited and coiled around my head, was my signature look. Elsa M. Anderson, the piano virtuoso who in some ways resembled a prima ballerina.
The concert itself was to end in farce, when Elsa found herself incapable (mentally, not technically) of playing the 'Rach' piece and played her own composition instead while the orchestra ploughed on with the original. Elsa has now stopped playing the piano professionally, instead teaching piano privately to the children of the internationally well-off, and Arthur, her teacher and mentor, has moved to his Sardinian second home, where her friends joke he perhaps has a lover:
They had meant it as a joke because he was now eighty. I never knew anything about his romantic life. I had not once seen Arthur with a partner, though I suspected he had his own arrangements. He was forty-six when he adopted me, so maybe the most inflamed parts of his libido had been tamed.
That's all in the opening pages of the novel - but the attentive reader of the above paragraph will immediately notice something is off (see 2) below).
Elsa is in Greece for one such set of lessons and in the novel she returns to England, then goes to Paris for another such series of lessons, back to England and then to Sardinia to visit the ailing Arthur, the story taking place over a year until the following August. Throughout it all Elsa wears the trilby hat, and keeps encountering, or thinks she encounters, the woman, her double. And she wrestles with what happened in the Viennese concert and also her own identity, including that of her birth mother, of which she has hitherto been uncurious.
The lessons of Levy's previous novel The Man Who Saw Everything is that what seemed like continuity errors were actually deliberate (if not necessarily explained) on the author's behalf, and this novel left me with a number of such questions, including:
1) Elsa's Covid vaccine
I believe the novel starts in September 2021, rather than September 2020, given the various aspects of the Covid timeline, although one could make a case for either. But Elsa receives her first Covid vaccine in France in November, with the pharmacist commenting that we will make a little piece of history. The first vaccinations in France, of the elderly, took place in late December 2020 (other than trials) but by November 2021, vaccination was routine, most of the UK population would have been double-vaccinated and the booster campaign was beginning.
2) the mystery of Arthur's age
Elsa is adopted by Arthur when she is 6 and she is now 34. He was 46 when he adopted her. That makes him around 74 now. But on three separate times (and by Elsa, and another character) we are told Arthur is 80, so he has aged 34 years while she has aged 28.
To add to the sense this is deliberate that he is 80 is mentioned three separate times (he’s very fit for a man of eighty Elsa tells someone in London, and Arthur looked after you since you were a child and now he is eighty is played back to her by Arthur's companion in Sardinia), so that the reader cannot really miss the anomaly. But them Elsa also tells another friend, almost gratuitously, He was born in 1946 after all, which is instead consistent with the correct age.
[Post review addition - disappointingly at least one of these discrepancies has been corrected in the final version - “He was fifty-two when he adopted me” - disappointing as this was then purely a mistake, not a sign of something more intriguing]
And connecting both of the above there is a sense of time slippage in the novel associated with the three time zones of GMT (London), GMT+1 (Paris, Sardinia) and GMT+2 (Greece), but with an odd error - five in Poros would be three not nine in London:
For some reason my laptop would not let me change UK time to Greek time, so I had to keep adding two hours to British time. If it was five in the afternoon in Poros, it was seven in the evening in London. This bending of time, backwards and forwards, added to the unreality of being in Greece after the long lockdown.
(Again another Goodreader suggests this may have been corrected)
3) the novel's title, August Blue.
Elsa died her hair blue in a concert in August - hence August blue. But Levy would be aware of other resonances so what is the connection with the poem The Sundew by Algernon Charles Swinburne and the associated painting August Blue by Henry Scott Tuke?
4) the link to Frozen
If you call a character, who has lost her birth parents, Elsa and associate her with the colour blue, (and h/t to Doug, have her surname as Anderson, as in Hans-Christian Anderson of The Snow Queen fame) then you must be making a nod to the greatest movie of the 21st century.
But what does Levy want us to take from this - was the 'fatal' concert Elsa letting it go?
5) the novel's epigraph "Even our shadows are in love when we walk"
This is taken from the closing words of My Mother Laughs, Daniella Shreir's translation of Chantal Akerman's original Ma mère rit (disappointingly the translator isn't credited in the novel), which records the decline of the film director's mother.
But who is the reference to in the context of this novel - Elsa and her doppelganger, Elsa and Arthur, her near life-long companion, or Elsa and her unknown (to her) birth mother? The previous line in My Mother Laughs reads, We loved each other, we went our separate ways, I don't remember why, and now we love each other, and on Akerman's book, in the words of The Arts Desk "Although the book is an elegy for her mother, it is Akerman’s own obituary.".
Overall, this is an intriguing work, but I was left with more questions than answers. And while beautiful at the sentence level, There are lots of parts of the novel (an Isadora Duncan thread, the Covid parts particularly the mask references, the tutorees) that while adding to the atmosphere don't seem to really fit together. The final confrontation between Elsa and the double was also rather anti-climatic.
3.5 stars rounded to 3 for now but I can see this becoming 4 as the novel is published and other readers (and interviews with the author) fill in some of the gaps.
Addition: Lisa in the comments below shows wonderfully how these different elements in the paragraph two above do combine so have upgraded to 4 stars
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC
March 1, 2023
I completely adore “August Blue”….
And ‘man-oh-man’, I’ve got a crush on Deborah Levy.
This is a short book, but from the very beginning to the very end, I enjoyed the entire atmosphere, the feelings, the music, the mystery, the dialogue, the intimate inner voice of our protagonist and the sweetness I felt for
*Madame Blue*and her life-experiences.
I didn’t read this with any intellectual commitment…..I just enjoyed it… fully enjoyed it !
The opening was one the best introductions into the ongoing journey we’re invited to take — as any book I’ve ever read: creative, visual, suspenseful, and fascinating.
“I first saw her in a flea market in Athens, buying two mechanical, dancing horses. The man who sold them to her was slipping a battery into the belly of the brown horse, and a super-heavy-duty-zinc AA. He showed her that to start the horse, which was the length of two large hands, she had to lift up its tail. To stop it she must pull the tail down. The brown horse had a string tied to its neck and if she held the string upwards and outward, she could direct its movements”.
“Up went to tail, and the horse began to dance, it’s for hinged legs trotting in a circle. He then showed her the white horse, with its black mane and white hooves. Did he want her to slip an AA into its belly so it too could begin to dance? Yes, she replied in English, but her accent was from somewhere else”.
“I was watching her from a stall laid out with miniature plaster statues of Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Apollo, Aphrodite. Some of these gods and goddesses have been turned into fridge magnets. Their final metamorphosis”.
Elsa A. Anderson was a thirty-four year old classical piano virtuoso.
The old masters were Elsa’s shield: Beethoven. Bach. Rachmaninov, Schumann.
“Their inner lives are valuable without measure”.
My thoughts about BLUE HAIR ….. [Elsa dyed her hair BLUE]….referring to the title of the book.
‘Blue’ has always been linked to tranquility, so it would make sense that people with blue hair are thought to be calm people.
But … it’s also a bold statement to dye one’s hair blue…. possibly suggesting it’s
‘my time’…honoring dreams…being more fully who we really are … experiencing life fuller.
So….
…..as they say, if the shoe fits…the shoe fits!
“The colourist was very tense.
“For a moment, I thought about my birth mother”.
“And then my foster-mother”.
“My new sleek, blue hair rippled down my back to just above my waist”.
“I had two mothers. One had given me up. And I had given up the woman who had replaced her. I could hear them gasping”.
“Author flung his arms in the air. My dear, he said, as I don’t have an open sleigh to be pulled by huskies across the stormy streets of London, we will share a taxi. You, Elsa M. Anderson, are now a natural blue.”
“Madame Blue”.
Markus was a thirteen year old boy with a German shepherd, a fierce dog, named Skippy.
After Elsa had made a mistake performing one night [Sergei Rachmaninoff] she walked off stage — and set-out to travel.
Marcus, was to be Elsa’s student in Greece. He played for Elsa the Saranande from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. the first time getting together.
Their relationship was charming — walks for lemonade—their conversations— and their playful moments.
Marcus liked to dance with his dog Skippy to Prince.
Elsa liked to watch Isadora Duncan and dance along with her.
They were an endearing pair!
Elsa also started up a friendship with Tomas, who had been sick on the boat coming from Paris to Grace. They drink a lot of alcohol together after favorite bar. And went swimming at two a.m.
Elsa would see the woman who bought the horses again in Northern London.
“I’ve got your hat”, Elsa said to the woman in her head. “When you return the horses, I will give it back to you”.
“It’s not a matter of returning the horses, she replied. Just because you want them doesn’t mean you can have them”.
“I thought of my double in Athens and Paris as I played. Like my mother, she, too, was listening very attentively. What I saw were the pink flowers growing by the Acropolis. I let them enter the music. They had taken me back to another ancient history. To the table, clause and toast, and the blackberry bushes are the first six years with my foster parents, to the chickens in the garden, and the roses falling away from the wall. They had tried to give me a home”
Yummy descriptions of salad with watermelon with feta cheese was mouthwatering…..
And when Elsa heard the midnight resonance of the woman who had bought the horses…..I felt lonely along with Elsa ….
and her thoughts about Isadora Duncan…..
who believed in freedom of expression — had inspired Elsa, was moving to me, too.
Isabel Duncan used to inspire me when I was growing up as well— I loved my modern dance classes.
There is much more I could share about this slim novel — more introspective/cerebral details ….Elsa’s powerful music teacher, Author, who was like a father to her - etc.
and other characters Bella and Max, but most ….
I simply enjoyed the entire feeling of being in Deborah Levy-land.
Loved it!!
And ‘man-oh-man’, I’ve got a crush on Deborah Levy.
This is a short book, but from the very beginning to the very end, I enjoyed the entire atmosphere, the feelings, the music, the mystery, the dialogue, the intimate inner voice of our protagonist and the sweetness I felt for
*Madame Blue*and her life-experiences.
I didn’t read this with any intellectual commitment…..I just enjoyed it… fully enjoyed it !
The opening was one the best introductions into the ongoing journey we’re invited to take — as any book I’ve ever read: creative, visual, suspenseful, and fascinating.
“I first saw her in a flea market in Athens, buying two mechanical, dancing horses. The man who sold them to her was slipping a battery into the belly of the brown horse, and a super-heavy-duty-zinc AA. He showed her that to start the horse, which was the length of two large hands, she had to lift up its tail. To stop it she must pull the tail down. The brown horse had a string tied to its neck and if she held the string upwards and outward, she could direct its movements”.
“Up went to tail, and the horse began to dance, it’s for hinged legs trotting in a circle. He then showed her the white horse, with its black mane and white hooves. Did he want her to slip an AA into its belly so it too could begin to dance? Yes, she replied in English, but her accent was from somewhere else”.
“I was watching her from a stall laid out with miniature plaster statues of Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Apollo, Aphrodite. Some of these gods and goddesses have been turned into fridge magnets. Their final metamorphosis”.
Elsa A. Anderson was a thirty-four year old classical piano virtuoso.
The old masters were Elsa’s shield: Beethoven. Bach. Rachmaninov, Schumann.
“Their inner lives are valuable without measure”.
My thoughts about BLUE HAIR ….. [Elsa dyed her hair BLUE]….referring to the title of the book.
‘Blue’ has always been linked to tranquility, so it would make sense that people with blue hair are thought to be calm people.
But … it’s also a bold statement to dye one’s hair blue…. possibly suggesting it’s
‘my time’…honoring dreams…being more fully who we really are … experiencing life fuller.
So….
…..as they say, if the shoe fits…the shoe fits!
“The colourist was very tense.
“For a moment, I thought about my birth mother”.
“And then my foster-mother”.
“My new sleek, blue hair rippled down my back to just above my waist”.
“I had two mothers. One had given me up. And I had given up the woman who had replaced her. I could hear them gasping”.
“Author flung his arms in the air. My dear, he said, as I don’t have an open sleigh to be pulled by huskies across the stormy streets of London, we will share a taxi. You, Elsa M. Anderson, are now a natural blue.”
“Madame Blue”.
Markus was a thirteen year old boy with a German shepherd, a fierce dog, named Skippy.
After Elsa had made a mistake performing one night [Sergei Rachmaninoff] she walked off stage — and set-out to travel.
Marcus, was to be Elsa’s student in Greece. He played for Elsa the Saranande from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. the first time getting together.
Their relationship was charming — walks for lemonade—their conversations— and their playful moments.
Marcus liked to dance with his dog Skippy to Prince.
Elsa liked to watch Isadora Duncan and dance along with her.
They were an endearing pair!
Elsa also started up a friendship with Tomas, who had been sick on the boat coming from Paris to Grace. They drink a lot of alcohol together after favorite bar. And went swimming at two a.m.
Elsa would see the woman who bought the horses again in Northern London.
“I’ve got your hat”, Elsa said to the woman in her head. “When you return the horses, I will give it back to you”.
“It’s not a matter of returning the horses, she replied. Just because you want them doesn’t mean you can have them”.
“I thought of my double in Athens and Paris as I played. Like my mother, she, too, was listening very attentively. What I saw were the pink flowers growing by the Acropolis. I let them enter the music. They had taken me back to another ancient history. To the table, clause and toast, and the blackberry bushes are the first six years with my foster parents, to the chickens in the garden, and the roses falling away from the wall. They had tried to give me a home”
Yummy descriptions of salad with watermelon with feta cheese was mouthwatering…..
And when Elsa heard the midnight resonance of the woman who had bought the horses…..I felt lonely along with Elsa ….
and her thoughts about Isadora Duncan…..
who believed in freedom of expression — had inspired Elsa, was moving to me, too.
Isabel Duncan used to inspire me when I was growing up as well— I loved my modern dance classes.
There is much more I could share about this slim novel — more introspective/cerebral details ….Elsa’s powerful music teacher, Author, who was like a father to her - etc.
and other characters Bella and Max, but most ….
I simply enjoyed the entire feeling of being in Deborah Levy-land.
Loved it!!
June 9, 2023
After that call, I went off alone to buy two tomatillos at the new rip-off organic grocery shop. It was a fruit, red like menstrual blood, sweet and fleshy.
A story about the grown up musical prodigy who sadly meanders around different cities, never connected to anyone or anything because of some mysterious past! And so this book begins, and then unravels in a continuation of episodes that feel so disconnected from each other, uninteresting and that are just there. And there's blue.
This is the second fiction of Levy that I've read, and this book has none of the dreamy confusing but satisfying feeling of her The Man Who Saw Everything, this was just so nothing. Well, she randomly mentions Proust, a lot of classical composers and many others but it doesn't ever build up to anything interesting. The doubles, so fresh!
And the fact that while I was reading this book I was also watching fantastic Tár that has so much more to say about art and gender in it and is much more satisfying artistically, also being about an elite world of world classical musicians, that experience didn't enrich this book but showed its flaws so much more.
I have no idea what Levy's design was but to me it's an obvious failure. Everything in here I've seen done already countless times and with much more artistic talent.
January 12, 2023
I'd eaten nothing all day except the croissants Marie had brought to my apartment. But that wasn't strictly true. The stars and the Seine were inside me. I was living in a very strange way, but I knew there were people in the world who were also living like this. Someone in Tokyo or Eritrea or New York or Denmark at this very moment was living life precariously, too. This mood, with its ambience of low level panic and hyper-alert connections to everything, would have its double or echo. I heard its music in my head under my hat. Her hat. It was hard to listen to it, but it was there, like a future that was obscure, a future infected by the governance of the world, the old and new tyrants and their consorts and enablers. I no longer wanted to think about them because they had too much attention anyway. Yet, I thought about them all the time.
And what about my double, who perhaps was not physically identical? To think about her was to speak to someone known, inside myself, someone who was slightly mysterious to me, someone who was listening very attentively.
The latest novel from an author whose previous three 21st Century novels (“Swimming Home”, “Hot Milk” and “The Man Who Saw Everything”) have been Booker longlisted (the first two Booker shortlisted and the last two Goldsmith Prize shortlisted) and who has also published a deservedly critically acclaimed Living Autobiography trilogy (“Things I Don’t Want to Know”, “The Cost of Living” and the particularly brilliant “Real Estate”).
There is a certain enigmatic quality to Levy’s fiction (although her contemporaneous non fiction writing does help to bring a certain clarity to it).
About “Hot Milk” I wrote “the narrative serves more as a device to set up a series of tableaux filled with striking imagery …. [which is] internally consistent and coherent building up a picture of female identity”.
For the brilliant “The Man Who Saw Everything” I found it easily the most enigmatic book on the Booker longlist (as well as one of the best), referred to a “final disintegration of any attempt at a conventional narrative … [justifiably] sacrificed on the alters of ideas and analogy” and was fascinated by the multiple possible interpretations (I read and discussed it twice with my two closest Goodreads friends and we all majored on different elements of the book in our reviews and readings).
This novel I think, at least on a first reading, was perhaps closer to “Hot Milk” although with it not due to being published until May, I am intrigued to see what other interpretations and lenses other readers bring to bear on the book - as well as on some of its anomalies which unlike “The Man Who Saw Everything” I was unable to easily relate to the book’s central idea.
I did wonder if my lack of knowledge of and (being honest) interest in classical music hindered my appreciation and understanding of the novel.
The novel is narrated in first person by Elsa M. Anderson. Fostered at a very young age in Suffolk (birth name Ann), she was at 6 taken under the wing of a brilliant and eccentric music teacher Arthur Goldstein (who knows her birth mother’s identity – but which Elsa has always chosen not to discover) and moved with him to his music school in London and then on via the Royal Academy of Music to become a world class/famous classical pianist.
Three weeks before the September in which the book starts, Elsa, now 34, how had already in some kind of mid-career crisis dyed her famously long brown hair blue (hence the book’s title), froze (pun not intended but acknowledged) during a concert in Vienna playing the wrong music and then walked off the stage and seemingly away from her concert career.
She is now travelling around cities (starting in Athens), meeting with some friends and taking on some private music tuition.
The book opens in a flea market – where she watches (and is watched and recognised) by a woman of similar age and appearance the woman buys the last two of some mechanical dancing horses Elsa is interested in but leaves behind a trilby which Elsa then adopts. As Elsa travels around she becomes convinced that the woman is some form of double and that she spots her as she moves around (London in October and December, Paris in November and then August, Sardinia in July) in a COVID world (with masks playing a prominent role – presumably symbolic of hidden identities).
And Elsa meditates and reflects on classical music and dance and much more besides – all of this against a background of Elsa coming to terms with her sudden career hiatus, what was behind her abandonment by her birth mother – the twin horses triggering early memories which draw her closer to her origins) and her relationship to the now Sardinia-based, ill and ageing Arthur (who to her surprise has a lover) – all of which causes her to reflect on her seemingly unravelling identity in the world – and all of this refracted through the absence/presence and even voice in her head of her double.
3.5 stars rounded up as I believe new depths to the novel will emerge around publication.
My thanks to Penguin General and Viking for an ARC via NetGalley
It occurred to me that what I had transmitted to her, across four countries, was pain.
We were all striding out into the world once again to infect and be infected by each other. If she was my double and I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was fool-ish? The air was electric between us, the way we transmitted our feelings to each other as they flowed through our arms, which were touching.
We agreed that whatever happened next in the world, we would still rub conditioner into our hair after we washed it and comb it through to the ends, we would soften our lips with rose-, strawberry- and cherry-scented balm, and though we would be interested to see a wolf perched in a lonely mountain, we liked our household animals to betray their savage nature and live with us in our reality, which was not theirs. They would lie in our laps and let us stroke them through waves of virus, wars, drought and floods and we would try not to transmit our fear to them.
October 2, 2023
Apparently we all have a doppelgänger* somewhere in the world. Someone whose likeness is so uncanny, that you can be mistaken for one another. Elsa M. Anderson crosses paths with hers in a flea market in Athens. It’s the end of the summer, and there’s already a slight chill in the air. Elsa is at a stall filled with plaster statues of gods and goddesses and sees further along there is a man selling two mechanical dancing horses. Which Elsa decides she desperately wants to buy, but her doppelgänger beats her to it. As if the purchase is made out of spite.
”I felt she had stolen something from me, something I would miss in my life.”
Paris, London, Sardinia. We follow Elsa on her travels as a music tutor for recalcitrant teenagers with little interest in the piano lessons she is teaching. Despite the fact that Elsa is a world renowned pianist, now reduced to earning meager pickings after having a spectacular meltdown onstage in Vienna, whilst performing a Rachmaninov concerto.
This is told in the first person, with Elsa as the narrator.
It’s a book filled with existential angst, where you can't help but think the characters are having a bit too much pity for themselves. But this is also what makes them interesting. As they feel too much, and music as Art takes over their world, and in the case of Elsa, her identity crisis after years of being encaged as a child prodigy through to a talented performer questioning who she was. Her exterior colouring of her long brunette hair a vibrant shade of blue, to mirror the emotions bubbling inside.
For Elsa was adopted at birth, and then at the age of six, her foster parents handed her over to the great musical genius Arthur Goldstein, who knew even then that her hands held magic in them.
As we criss cross countries and friends and lovers, Elsa spots her doppelgänger in various settings. Usually just a glimpse, within finger’s reach…Will the two ever actually meet?
This is such a beautiful book about identity and falling apart. About memories and what can trigger them. Set in the middle of the recent pandemic, it’s quite discomfiting to be reading of the restrictions of “life in lockdown” and mask wearing. It’s almost surreal to think we lived through that. And no, it’s not a focus of the novel at all. It’s simply mentioned in parts.
And yes, you will discover why the dancing mechanical horses held such special meaning for Elsa. It’s interesting to me that this is the second book I’ve read this year featuring horses in it, the other being the sensational The Earth Spinner by Anuradha Roy. Horses, doppelgängers, what can it all mean?
I read this in one sitting, which hasn’t happened for a long time. The flowy, dreamlike quality of the story had me turning page after page. It was the perfect long weekend Monday read, sitting under the lemon tree with our tabby princess.
Reading this was like watching a stylish black and white French movie from the 1960s. Sublime. A standout for me as this year is slowly and yet so quickly drawing to an end.
* I couldn’t help but think of the hilarious doppelgänger scene in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten. It’s not something you read about all that often.
”We should never overestimate a person’s strength just because it suits us to do so, she said.”
”I felt she had stolen something from me, something I would miss in my life.”
Paris, London, Sardinia. We follow Elsa on her travels as a music tutor for recalcitrant teenagers with little interest in the piano lessons she is teaching. Despite the fact that Elsa is a world renowned pianist, now reduced to earning meager pickings after having a spectacular meltdown onstage in Vienna, whilst performing a Rachmaninov concerto.
This is told in the first person, with Elsa as the narrator.
It’s a book filled with existential angst, where you can't help but think the characters are having a bit too much pity for themselves. But this is also what makes them interesting. As they feel too much, and music as Art takes over their world, and in the case of Elsa, her identity crisis after years of being encaged as a child prodigy through to a talented performer questioning who she was. Her exterior colouring of her long brunette hair a vibrant shade of blue, to mirror the emotions bubbling inside.
For Elsa was adopted at birth, and then at the age of six, her foster parents handed her over to the great musical genius Arthur Goldstein, who knew even then that her hands held magic in them.
As we criss cross countries and friends and lovers, Elsa spots her doppelgänger in various settings. Usually just a glimpse, within finger’s reach…Will the two ever actually meet?
This is such a beautiful book about identity and falling apart. About memories and what can trigger them. Set in the middle of the recent pandemic, it’s quite discomfiting to be reading of the restrictions of “life in lockdown” and mask wearing. It’s almost surreal to think we lived through that. And no, it’s not a focus of the novel at all. It’s simply mentioned in parts.
And yes, you will discover why the dancing mechanical horses held such special meaning for Elsa. It’s interesting to me that this is the second book I’ve read this year featuring horses in it, the other being the sensational The Earth Spinner by Anuradha Roy. Horses, doppelgängers, what can it all mean?
I read this in one sitting, which hasn’t happened for a long time. The flowy, dreamlike quality of the story had me turning page after page. It was the perfect long weekend Monday read, sitting under the lemon tree with our tabby princess.
Reading this was like watching a stylish black and white French movie from the 1960s. Sublime. A standout for me as this year is slowly and yet so quickly drawing to an end.
* I couldn’t help but think of the hilarious doppelgänger scene in David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten. It’s not something you read about all that often.
”We should never overestimate a person’s strength just because it suits us to do so, she said.”
February 7, 2023
3.5, rounded down. I enjoyed this slightly more than The Man Who Saw Everything, and much less than Hot Milk. But all three Levy novels are built according to the same blueprint: the novelistic equivalent of an elliptical European art film from the 70s (Agnès Varda? Chantal Akerman?).
Our first-person narrator Elsa M. Anderson is a blue-haired (yes, I agree with my GR friends that the Disney princess allusion was deliberate) concert pianist who has fled her high-flying career after freezing up during Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, and flits from one European capital to another giving music lessons to teenagers. From time to time, she runs into (or narrowly misses) a woman whom she perceives as her Doppelgänger, whose trilby hat she wears throughout the novel as a talisman.
We never experience the world outside her head, and her subjective experience of time and other humans appears to be severely warped. More important, her own sense of identity seems unformed, deformed, even dissociative, now that her virtuoso performance days are over. She is strangely incurious about the circumstances of her adoption and the identity of her parents. She has difficulty forming relationships with others, and has a highly dysfunctional and neglectful relationship with her foster father Arthur, the piano teacher who raised her and groomed her for a career as a virtuoso, willfully blind to the fact that he has been in a long-term relationship with a man. And since the novel takes place in Covidian times, masking is also an on-the-nose metaphor for the masks we wear as we perform our sense of selfhood...
The puzzle didn't cohere for me this time, and Levy is making her readers work harder than ever to piece their way through the fragments. I didn't expect a neat resolution, and tried not to make too much sense of what I was reading. But as I'm distilling my experiences a few days later, it wasn't especially engaging or memorable, compared to other novels in her impressive career.
Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC (months early) in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.
Our first-person narrator Elsa M. Anderson is a blue-haired (yes, I agree with my GR friends that the Disney princess allusion was deliberate) concert pianist who has fled her high-flying career after freezing up during Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, and flits from one European capital to another giving music lessons to teenagers. From time to time, she runs into (or narrowly misses) a woman whom she perceives as her Doppelgänger, whose trilby hat she wears throughout the novel as a talisman.
We never experience the world outside her head, and her subjective experience of time and other humans appears to be severely warped. More important, her own sense of identity seems unformed, deformed, even dissociative, now that her virtuoso performance days are over. She is strangely incurious about the circumstances of her adoption and the identity of her parents. She has difficulty forming relationships with others, and has a highly dysfunctional and neglectful relationship with her foster father Arthur, the piano teacher who raised her and groomed her for a career as a virtuoso, willfully blind to the fact that he has been in a long-term relationship with a man. And since the novel takes place in Covidian times, masking is also an on-the-nose metaphor for the masks we wear as we perform our sense of selfhood...
The puzzle didn't cohere for me this time, and Levy is making her readers work harder than ever to piece their way through the fragments. I didn't expect a neat resolution, and tried not to make too much sense of what I was reading. But as I'm distilling my experiences a few days later, it wasn't especially engaging or memorable, compared to other novels in her impressive career.
Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC (months early) in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.
January 16, 2024
the writing in this is just phenomenal. so dream like and melancholic, you can FEEL the mental purgatory elsa is in, and those last six chapters like jesus! reading this felt like what i think im supposed to experience when i read poetry if that makes any sense lol. very much a “subdued plot mainly vibes” story but this was so emotionally pulling like wow
June 17, 2023
This is the third book that i have read in a relatively short space of time that requires ones full attention, plus a great deal of thought. Those who read Deborah Levys novels will not be surprised that this is so. Her books and her writings are markedly original, often like dream sequences that I find compelling.
A woman, in her thirties, a piano prodigy, walks off the stage in the middle of a concert. Why and who she is will become part of the focus of this novel. We follow her across Europe, more so after she spots a woman buying a set of mechanical horses that she wants to but herself. That the woman looks like her, might be her doppelganger, causes her to look everywhere for this woman. She does spot her in various locations and places. Is she being followed and if so for what reason?
A novel about identity, about how important ones own self is dependent on who we are. There are clues in this novel, which is where the paying attention come in. At books end I was able to see what these very dreamlike images meant.
Once again the narrator was terrific but it might have been easier to follow in print.
A woman, in her thirties, a piano prodigy, walks off the stage in the middle of a concert. Why and who she is will become part of the focus of this novel. We follow her across Europe, more so after she spots a woman buying a set of mechanical horses that she wants to but herself. That the woman looks like her, might be her doppelganger, causes her to look everywhere for this woman. She does spot her in various locations and places. Is she being followed and if so for what reason?
A novel about identity, about how important ones own self is dependent on who we are. There are clues in this novel, which is where the paying attention come in. At books end I was able to see what these very dreamlike images meant.
Once again the narrator was terrific but it might have been easier to follow in print.
March 4, 2024
Deborah Levy is a writer who has always challenged me. Her three slim autobiographical instalments are a sheer delight, they’re punchy and illuminating as she ruminates on segments of her life, providing a wry commentary on some of the challenges she’s faced and people she’s met. But I’ve sometimes found her fiction somewhat less satisfying, in the sense that I’ve always been impressed by the intelligent dialogue she invariably provides but have sometimes found her characters a little soulless. Perhaps that’s a little harsh, as in The Man Who Saw Everything she introduced me to a Jewish historian called Saul Adler who I found utterly fascinating, but it’s certainly true of the people who populated Hot Milk and Swimming Home. So what to make of this one?
Elsa M. Anderson was brought up by the famous piano teacher Arthur Goldstein. Her very early years are initially a bit of a mystery, but it’s clear that Arthur had recognised her prodigious talent and over the years was able to mould her into a world class performer. But one day she inexplicably deviates from the piece she is playing during a concert in Vienna and shortly after simply walks off the stage. Her story is picked up soon after this event.
At age thirty four she seems adrift, travelling around Europe, from London to Athens, Paris, and the islands of Poros and Sardinia. A mysterious woman seems to haunt Ella, appearing (or at least seeming to) in various places. Elsa calls think she’s her ‘double’ and becomes somewhat obsessed by her. The tale takes place during the pandemic and the wearing of masks adds an additional element of mystery to proceedings.
So the set-up is interesting, but what of the reading experience? Well, in truth I failed to identify with Elsa. Her world is very different to mine, infused with classical music as it is and with the overwhelming sense of being adrift after having now abandoned something she’d spent the majority of her life to date cultivating. Then there’s the mystery of the woman – her double – who she spots from time to time; try as I might, I just couldn’t comprehend where this fitted into the overall narrative. In consequence found it all a rather frustrating experience and discovered that I was increasingly reluctant to return to its pages.
I’m sure that other readers will have very different feelings to me about this one, in fact I’ve already read a few reviews to this effect. Would a second reading would unlock something, or is it just that I simply lack the imagination to knit everything together? I don’t know. I remain a fan of Levy’s gifts and I’ll continue to grab her books as soon as they become available; she offers something I don’t get from other writers and therefore even if this one failed to engage me I know I’ll be back for more.
My thanks to Penguin for providing a copy of this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review.
Elsa M. Anderson was brought up by the famous piano teacher Arthur Goldstein. Her very early years are initially a bit of a mystery, but it’s clear that Arthur had recognised her prodigious talent and over the years was able to mould her into a world class performer. But one day she inexplicably deviates from the piece she is playing during a concert in Vienna and shortly after simply walks off the stage. Her story is picked up soon after this event.
At age thirty four she seems adrift, travelling around Europe, from London to Athens, Paris, and the islands of Poros and Sardinia. A mysterious woman seems to haunt Ella, appearing (or at least seeming to) in various places. Elsa calls think she’s her ‘double’ and becomes somewhat obsessed by her. The tale takes place during the pandemic and the wearing of masks adds an additional element of mystery to proceedings.
So the set-up is interesting, but what of the reading experience? Well, in truth I failed to identify with Elsa. Her world is very different to mine, infused with classical music as it is and with the overwhelming sense of being adrift after having now abandoned something she’d spent the majority of her life to date cultivating. Then there’s the mystery of the woman – her double – who she spots from time to time; try as I might, I just couldn’t comprehend where this fitted into the overall narrative. In consequence found it all a rather frustrating experience and discovered that I was increasingly reluctant to return to its pages.
I’m sure that other readers will have very different feelings to me about this one, in fact I’ve already read a few reviews to this effect. Would a second reading would unlock something, or is it just that I simply lack the imagination to knit everything together? I don’t know. I remain a fan of Levy’s gifts and I’ll continue to grab her books as soon as they become available; she offers something I don’t get from other writers and therefore even if this one failed to engage me I know I’ll be back for more.
My thanks to Penguin for providing a copy of this book via NetGalley in return for an honest review.
June 23, 2023
Blue was a separation from my DNA.
August Blue follows a virtuoso pianist Elsa, who finds herself at a crossroads after a fiasco performance in Vienna. What the hell, Elsa? A Blue Period comes into Elsa’s life: she dyes her brown hair colour blue and sets off on a journey across Europe, haunted by the presence of a mysterious woman so much like herself, but slightly different - a double or a shadow.
Although this motif of a shadow or a double is not something new in literature or cinema, Deborah Levy explores it in an intriguing way. August Blue reads like a puzzle, a blue box in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The narrative that has been built up for Elsa doesn’t feel right anymore. She experiences both individual and global crises - as she looks for her own self, her own identity, there is a sense that a kind of metamorphosis is bound to occur.
Elsa’s world is piano, so musical elements and references flow through this novel. Despite dedicating her life to Sergei Rachmaninoff, Frédéric Chopin, Erik Satie, Philip Glass and others, Elsa starts to wonder about performance and creation. Enchanted by the free movements of the modern choreographer Isadora Duncan, she starts to look for her own composition in music and life.
After all, she had already been written by everyone else.
There is something special about the colour blue:
For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. - Rebecca Solnit, in A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
Throughout history, this colour has been playing a very important role in art, literature and even everyday life. Many artists from those of Ancient Egypt till modern artists such as Yves Klein, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso have used blue in their work to represent or anti-represent a complex variety of themes and mood. Its variety of pigments and tones has never stopped from evolving - our relationship with blue demonstrates our relationship with the world.
When I saw the title of this story I was over the moon. Given that the colour blue is such powerful material with endless possibilities, I was expecting something truly astonishing. While I enjoyed how Levy used the colour blue in her novel, for example, with a juxtaposition of metamorphosis and the process of Elsa’s hair-dying, I wished she used this motif in a more extensive or creative way.
Besides the colour blue motif, there are some other themes with a big potential which Levy briefly touches upon, but they end up unattended in the background - in comparison to her The Man Who Saw Everything, which I read earlier this year, I felt August Blue was less cohesive. As much as I enjoyed some of Elsa’s (or Levy’s ) observations, they felt slightly out of place and sometimes I struggled to make a connection between those details and the big picture. On the other hand, a really intriguing aspect of this novel and probably Levy’s work - just like musical compositions aren’t answers but questions, Levy asks you a question, wants you to figure out her novel.
This is my second Levy - there is something really appealing about the effortless way this author interweaves the mundane and the lyrical in her writing. While I didn’t find August Blue as engaging as The Man Who Saw Everything, I thought it was an interesting reading experience and I look forward to discovering her other works.
From an illustrated portfolio Dance for Life: Isadora Duncan and Her California Dance Legacy at the Temple of Wings by Margaretta Mitchell.
Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux who kindly provided me with an advanced reading copy via NetGalley.
3.5/5
August Blue follows a virtuoso pianist Elsa, who finds herself at a crossroads after a fiasco performance in Vienna. What the hell, Elsa? A Blue Period comes into Elsa’s life: she dyes her brown hair colour blue and sets off on a journey across Europe, haunted by the presence of a mysterious woman so much like herself, but slightly different - a double or a shadow.
Although this motif of a shadow or a double is not something new in literature or cinema, Deborah Levy explores it in an intriguing way. August Blue reads like a puzzle, a blue box in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The narrative that has been built up for Elsa doesn’t feel right anymore. She experiences both individual and global crises - as she looks for her own self, her own identity, there is a sense that a kind of metamorphosis is bound to occur.
Elsa’s world is piano, so musical elements and references flow through this novel. Despite dedicating her life to Sergei Rachmaninoff, Frédéric Chopin, Erik Satie, Philip Glass and others, Elsa starts to wonder about performance and creation. Enchanted by the free movements of the modern choreographer Isadora Duncan, she starts to look for her own composition in music and life.
After all, she had already been written by everyone else.
There is something special about the colour blue:
For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. - Rebecca Solnit, in A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
Throughout history, this colour has been playing a very important role in art, literature and even everyday life. Many artists from those of Ancient Egypt till modern artists such as Yves Klein, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso have used blue in their work to represent or anti-represent a complex variety of themes and mood. Its variety of pigments and tones has never stopped from evolving - our relationship with blue demonstrates our relationship with the world.
When I saw the title of this story I was over the moon. Given that the colour blue is such powerful material with endless possibilities, I was expecting something truly astonishing. While I enjoyed how Levy used the colour blue in her novel, for example, with a juxtaposition of metamorphosis and the process of Elsa’s hair-dying, I wished she used this motif in a more extensive or creative way.
Besides the colour blue motif, there are some other themes with a big potential which Levy briefly touches upon, but they end up unattended in the background - in comparison to her The Man Who Saw Everything, which I read earlier this year, I felt August Blue was less cohesive. As much as I enjoyed some of Elsa’s (or Levy’s ) observations, they felt slightly out of place and sometimes I struggled to make a connection between those details and the big picture. On the other hand, a really intriguing aspect of this novel and probably Levy’s work - just like musical compositions aren’t answers but questions, Levy asks you a question, wants you to figure out her novel.
This is my second Levy - there is something really appealing about the effortless way this author interweaves the mundane and the lyrical in her writing. While I didn’t find August Blue as engaging as The Man Who Saw Everything, I thought it was an interesting reading experience and I look forward to discovering her other works.
From an illustrated portfolio Dance for Life: Isadora Duncan and Her California Dance Legacy at the Temple of Wings by Margaretta Mitchell.
Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux who kindly provided me with an advanced reading copy via NetGalley.
3.5/5
December 22, 2023
crying screaming thinking about my mother
As a devout Levyntor when I heard that Deb’s new book was about a former child prodigy pianist who dyes her hair blue and travels around Europe I was … concerned. And that was a me problem. And I should not be forgiven because why would I ever doubt Deborah Levy?
We follow Elsa, a world-renowned concert pianist who has walked off stage mid-show in Vienna. To the concern of her adoptive maestro father, eccentric friends and the general public she has seemingly quit at the height of her career.
At a significant pay cut she takes up tutoring gifted but emotionally neglected children of the wealthy. But wherever she travels a woman is shadowing her, narrowly escaping confrontation every time. And why can’t she stop, for the first time in her life, thinking about the biological mother she never knew?
Blending surreal fragments and matter-of-fact prose, elements come together long after the final page. This symbiosis is iconic Levy; I always feel like her books require you to give something of yourself, it feels like a partnership. As if the reader's perception and memory of the narrative is as important to the story as her intent. It's such a special, rare sensation I get when I read her work that I struggle to verbalise but truly treasure. Recurring cat symbolism slayed also.
I did rate this 4 stars due to my absolute inability to enjoy anything set at any point during the pandemic and ALSO a preconceived idea that ruined something for me (my bad). I adore her memoirs so the bar is sky high. AND I'm sorry but It is simply impossible for me to romanticise Café Flore after being charged EIGHT EUROS FOR AN ORANGINA, like is the ghost of James Baldwin personally delivering said Orangina?? be fr
Anyway, blue-haired bitches really be like this...
As a devout Levyntor when I heard that Deb’s new book was about a former child prodigy pianist who dyes her hair blue and travels around Europe I was … concerned. And that was a me problem. And I should not be forgiven because why would I ever doubt Deborah Levy?
We follow Elsa, a world-renowned concert pianist who has walked off stage mid-show in Vienna. To the concern of her adoptive maestro father, eccentric friends and the general public she has seemingly quit at the height of her career.
At a significant pay cut she takes up tutoring gifted but emotionally neglected children of the wealthy. But wherever she travels a woman is shadowing her, narrowly escaping confrontation every time. And why can’t she stop, for the first time in her life, thinking about the biological mother she never knew?
Blending surreal fragments and matter-of-fact prose, elements come together long after the final page. This symbiosis is iconic Levy; I always feel like her books require you to give something of yourself, it feels like a partnership. As if the reader's perception and memory of the narrative is as important to the story as her intent. It's such a special, rare sensation I get when I read her work that I struggle to verbalise but truly treasure. Recurring cat symbolism slayed also.
I did rate this 4 stars due to my absolute inability to enjoy anything set at any point during the pandemic and ALSO a preconceived idea that ruined something for me (my bad). I adore her memoirs so the bar is sky high. AND I'm sorry but It is simply impossible for me to romanticise Café Flore after being charged EIGHT EUROS FOR AN ORANGINA, like is the ghost of James Baldwin personally delivering said Orangina?? be fr
Anyway, blue-haired bitches really be like this...
July 19, 2024
He wished me courage. I didn’t know what to say back. In a way, courage was my problem. Not the lack of it. The way courage silenced everything else.
“August Blue” está mais próximo do evanescente “Hot Milk” do que do psicodrama “Nadar para Casa” e da obra-prima “O Homem que Via Tudo”, as minhas obras de ficção preferidas de Deborah Levy, mas qualquer publicação dela é para mim um acontecimento. Como nas obras anteriores, tudo está carregado de simbolismo, começando pela cor azul do título, cor do mar, cor do cabelo da protagonista.
I was a natural blue.
I am a natural blue.
I was, I am.
E tudo evoca memórias, algumas recalcadas, como os dois cavalos mecânicos que Elsa vê a sua doppelgänger comprar numa feira em Atenas; essa mulher que não é tanto a sua dupla como o seu desdobramento.
And what about my double, who perhaps was not physically identical? To think about her was to speak to someone known, inside myself, someone who was slightly mysterious to me, someone who was listening very attentively.
Elsa que até aos seis anos, altura em que foi adoptada por um genial professor de piano, se chamara Ann. Elsa, a prodigiosa pianista que, ao executar o 2º Concerto para Piano de Rachmaninov, composto no meio de uma depressão, entra em colapso e, durante dois minutos e doze segundos, improvisa.
If you are not you, who?
If she’s not there, where?
Incapaz de voltar a subir ao palco, numa crise de vocação e de identidade, dá duas aulas particulares a dois jovens alunos, um na Grécia, que prefere ser tratado por “eles”, e outra, também com as suas próprias angústias, em Paris. Pode dizer-se que Levy não deixa nada ao acaso e que é generosa a semear pistas para esta dualidade por toda a obra, o que leva o leitor numa demanda semelhante à dos livros “Onde está o Wally?”: aqui, duas batidas à porta; ali, dois homens, etc…
If she was my double and I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was foolish?
É, portanto, também abordada a questão da sanidade mental, um tema sempre flagrante nas obras desta autora. Porque a mente prega partidas, Elsa passou a vida inteira impassivelmente dedicada à sua carreira, sem querer conhecer a identidade da mãe biológica e, agora, na casa dos 30, dá-se a clique, dá-se o tilt, e deixa tudo para trás, numa fuga através de quatro países que só vai terminar na Sardenha, onde o seu pai adoptivo está a morrer e lhe entrega um dossiê que ela tarda em abrir. Para quem é habitué no universo desta autora, sabe a importância que a água tem para ela, e se se aliar à sempre eterna necessidade do mergulho a omnipresente saúde mental das personagens, não se estranha a existência de afirmações como esta:
She started to talk about all famous women who had committed suicide by drowning. There are vertical swimmers and horizontal swimmers, she said. I myself have sometimes thought I will become a vertical swimmer. No one says I have to do the third act of my life. It is always nasty. If I become ill in old age, I have not ruled it out.
“August Blue” está mais próximo do evanescente “Hot Milk” do que do psicodrama “Nadar para Casa” e da obra-prima “O Homem que Via Tudo”, as minhas obras de ficção preferidas de Deborah Levy, mas qualquer publicação dela é para mim um acontecimento. Como nas obras anteriores, tudo está carregado de simbolismo, começando pela cor azul do título, cor do mar, cor do cabelo da protagonista.
I was a natural blue.
I am a natural blue.
I was, I am.
E tudo evoca memórias, algumas recalcadas, como os dois cavalos mecânicos que Elsa vê a sua doppelgänger comprar numa feira em Atenas; essa mulher que não é tanto a sua dupla como o seu desdobramento.
And what about my double, who perhaps was not physically identical? To think about her was to speak to someone known, inside myself, someone who was slightly mysterious to me, someone who was listening very attentively.
Elsa que até aos seis anos, altura em que foi adoptada por um genial professor de piano, se chamara Ann. Elsa, a prodigiosa pianista que, ao executar o 2º Concerto para Piano de Rachmaninov, composto no meio de uma depressão, entra em colapso e, durante dois minutos e doze segundos, improvisa.
If you are not you, who?
If she’s not there, where?
Incapaz de voltar a subir ao palco, numa crise de vocação e de identidade, dá duas aulas particulares a dois jovens alunos, um na Grécia, que prefere ser tratado por “eles”, e outra, também com as suas próprias angústias, em Paris. Pode dizer-se que Levy não deixa nada ao acaso e que é generosa a semear pistas para esta dualidade por toda a obra, o que leva o leitor numa demanda semelhante à dos livros “Onde está o Wally?”: aqui, duas batidas à porta; ali, dois homens, etc…
If she was my double and I was hers, was it true that she was knowing, I was unknowing, she was sane, I was crazy, she was wise, I was foolish?
É, portanto, também abordada a questão da sanidade mental, um tema sempre flagrante nas obras desta autora. Porque a mente prega partidas, Elsa passou a vida inteira impassivelmente dedicada à sua carreira, sem querer conhecer a identidade da mãe biológica e, agora, na casa dos 30, dá-se a clique, dá-se o tilt, e deixa tudo para trás, numa fuga através de quatro países que só vai terminar na Sardenha, onde o seu pai adoptivo está a morrer e lhe entrega um dossiê que ela tarda em abrir. Para quem é habitué no universo desta autora, sabe a importância que a água tem para ela, e se se aliar à sempre eterna necessidade do mergulho a omnipresente saúde mental das personagens, não se estranha a existência de afirmações como esta:
She started to talk about all famous women who had committed suicide by drowning. There are vertical swimmers and horizontal swimmers, she said. I myself have sometimes thought I will become a vertical swimmer. No one says I have to do the third act of my life. It is always nasty. If I become ill in old age, I have not ruled it out.
February 17, 2023
PARIS, AUGUST
I had left my winter coat in the Express dry-cleaners on Rue des Carmes nine months ago. At that time, I was pale and blue, now I was tanned and the blue was fading. It was a hot day to be wearing the trilby hat.
With time slips, doppelgängers, doublings, and identity crises, there’s an air of unsettled reality to Deborah Levy’s August Blue; and being set in the post-lockdown Covid days of first vaccines and voluntary mask use, there’s certainly something relatable about this questioning of who we are; questioning how we live. With a stream of artists evoked — from Rachmaninoff and Isadora Duncan to Proust and French film director Agnès Varda — who are presented as having used art to explore their own realities, Levy seems to be asking the reader to search for meaning beyond the printed page (and with some [widely noted in other reviews] odd parallels to the movie Frozen and what appear to be mistakes in the timeline, I really don’t think the author wants us to take her at her literal words here). As straightforward storytelling, this is an odd little tale of a young woman trying to figure out who she is (and why she is and why she continues to be), but as an artistic rendering of our (more or less) collective post-Covid experience, Levy captures something very true about the unreality of the time; it feels essential that artists like Levy try to capture what, beyond the base details, most of us have trouble putting into words about the pandemic experience — even if the reader needs to peek behind the words to see it. I loved this. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
She seemed to be about my age, thirty-four, and like me she was wearing a tightly belted green raincoat. It was almost identical to mine, except hers had three gold buttons sewn on to the cuffs. We obviously wanted the same things. My startling thought at that moment was that she and I were the same person. She was me and I was her. Perhaps she was a little more than I was. I sensed she had known I was standing nearby and that she was taunting me.
As the story begins, we meet Elsa M. Anderson: a world-famous classical pianist who, after embarrassing herself at a recent concert, has decided to take a break from performing; tutoring some over-privileged children while she decides what comes next. Walking through an Athens flea market, Elsa sees a woman buying some mechanical horse toys and she gets the uncanny feeling that this woman is her double, even if they don’t quite look the same. As Elsa travels from Greece to Paris to London and Sardinia, she’ll cross paths with this woman a few more times (always not quite seeing her face behind a blue medical mask). And as her adoptive father (and piano teacher) lays dying of a lung tumour, Elsa will finally seek some answers about who she is, discover who he really is, and make some decisions about how to live the rest of her life. But that’s just the plot.
I was a natural blue
I am a natural blue
I was, I am.
Perhaps anticipating her encroaching identity crisis, Elsa had recently dyed her trademark waist-length chestnut hair a deep shade of blue (and I say “trademark” because apparently Elsa is so famous that she’s recognised on the street: Of course I bloody know who you are.) But beyond the literally blue hair, coupled with the name “Elsa” (last name Anderson), it would seem that we’re supposed to be put in mind of the movie Frozen (which I have not seen as I have no littles around), and looking deeper than the literal, you might be put in mind of the movie’s source material — Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen — and looking a little deeper than that, you might learn that he had based the ice-hearted main character of that story on the opera singer Jenny Lind, who had not returned Anderson’s affections — Jenny Lind being, like Elsa, a world famous performer who walked away from the stage at a young age. (And then you might learn that Anderson may have been gay, or perhaps bisexual, and different characters from August Blue might click into place.)
Elsa dying her hair blue seems to inspire this novel’s title, but looking deeper, one discovers a nineteenth century painting of that name by British artist Henry Scott Tuke which depicts four boys (three of them naked) swimming in Falmouth harbour — and not only do characters in the novel go skinny dipping, but the painting is noted for evoking both innocence and homoeroticism (again hearkening back to characters in the book). Looking even deeper, we learn that the title of the painting is taken from the poem “The Sundew” by Algernon Swinburne, which includes the lines:
Thou wert not worth green midsummer
Nor fit to live to August blue
These lines, taken as inspiration for Tuke’s “idyllic” painting, might seem to stress making the most of the time we’re given (a worthwhile lesson in pandemic times), but variously googled analyses of the poem assure me that the point Swinburne was trying to make (in his first collection of poems, which was considered scandalous at the time for its many taboo topics) was that one must look beyond the surface (in this case, of what appears on the surface to be a poem about unrequited love) for the deeper truths disguised in art. And if I discovered all of this, there’s no doubt that Levy intentionally hid her kernel of common truths within the Frozen —> Snow Queen —> HC Anderson —> Jenny Lind puzzle, wrapped in the dyed-in-August blue hair —> Tuke —> Swinburne —> sundew enigma. But even if the reader isn’t inclined to drill down on the sources, August Blue truly captures the sense of unreality — the time warpy disconnection to “real life” that I know I went through — and this tone and mood are rewarding in their own right. On and off the page, I enjoyed every bit of this.
It felt as if everything had changed and everything was the same. The roots of the trees under the tarmac of Boulevard Saint-Germain would keep growing. The roots of my hair would keep growing out the blue. The sea levels would keep rising. Two young people standing by the bus stop were kissing. Frantic kissing. As if this devouring of each other was an existential duty. The obligation to keep the life drive going strong when death is our ultimate destiny.
June 19, 2023
This is pretty classic Levy and on par with Hot Milk. In this story, a concert pianist's performance failure triggers an existential crisis. She travels across Europe - catalyzed by the appearances of an elusive doppelganger - on her rediscovery of identity. The best element of this novel is the inclusion of many Proustian moments which color the narrative.
At the granular level, I didn't entirely bond with most of the characters. The non-binary Greek student, Marcus, was easily my favorite.
3.5 stars
At the granular level, I didn't entirely bond with most of the characters. The non-binary Greek student, Marcus, was easily my favorite.
3.5 stars
April 19, 2023
Whatever Deborah Levy writes, I'm there for it. There's something so atmospheric about her writing. It makes you think, while not being hard to absorb or a struggle to read. She knows how to build suspense to keep the pages turning.
This is the story of a prodigy, Elsa, who was raised by a man who was also her piano teacher after she was given up for adoption. Slowly, the reader gets to know Elsa better, her struggles with her piano career, and her relationships, both sexual and parental. Throughout the book, Elsa has a doppelganger, and she wonders who this woman is exactly. The storyline that focuses on Elsa's doppleganger is the symbolic heart of the book, which I found challenging to discern.
Like other Levy works, there's a hazy mysterious overlay that leaves the reader guessing a bit as to what is exactly going on. This strategy is so up my alley, but in prior books, I had a strong hypothesis at least of what the author meant to convey. In this book, I didn't feel quite as wowed by the ending because I didn't have this same feeling of conclusion. And when I re-read the initial chapter to see if I had missed any loose threads, I felt even less clear.
Fortunately, I didn't care all that much! It was still a very worthwhile READ, and I'd happily pick it up all over again. I appreciate works that make room for reader interpretation and speculation . . .to me, this is literature at its best. It's the type of work I want to discuss and dissect and speculate about . . .and from that perspective, Levy completely delivers.
This is the story of a prodigy, Elsa, who was raised by a man who was also her piano teacher after she was given up for adoption. Slowly, the reader gets to know Elsa better, her struggles with her piano career, and her relationships, both sexual and parental. Throughout the book, Elsa has a doppelganger, and she wonders who this woman is exactly. The storyline that focuses on Elsa's doppleganger is the symbolic heart of the book, which I found challenging to discern.
Like other Levy works, there's a hazy mysterious overlay that leaves the reader guessing a bit as to what is exactly going on. This strategy is so up my alley, but in prior books, I had a strong hypothesis at least of what the author meant to convey. In this book, I didn't feel quite as wowed by the ending because I didn't have this same feeling of conclusion. And when I re-read the initial chapter to see if I had missed any loose threads, I felt even less clear.
Fortunately, I didn't care all that much! It was still a very worthwhile READ, and I'd happily pick it up all over again. I appreciate works that make room for reader interpretation and speculation . . .to me, this is literature at its best. It's the type of work I want to discuss and dissect and speculate about . . .and from that perspective, Levy completely delivers.
Read
June 28, 2023Deborah Levy is a wonderful and sometimes an intense author.
Having read three other books of hers, I am absolutely surprised without a doubt- that this book went right over my head and am not sure why. Does it make me an outlier.
I caught it all - all of it related to Elsa's insecurities and assumptions. I can put the puzzle together but can't see it. I would bet if I re read it, it would be
so much clearer.
Having read three other books of hers, I am absolutely surprised without a doubt- that this book went right over my head and am not sure why. Does it make me an outlier.
I caught it all - all of it related to Elsa's insecurities and assumptions. I can put the puzzle together but can't see it. I would bet if I re read it, it would be
so much clearer.
June 22, 2023
3.5
I just don't think I "get" this author but that's ok I can still appreciate the writing. It is unexpected in the best ways, managing to be both no-nonsense and vaguely eccentric.
If asked to recall what I remember of this novel I am sure I will answer: blue hair, mechanical horses, piano gubbins, sea urchins, oh and Isadora Duncan.
I just don't think I "get" this author but that's ok I can still appreciate the writing. It is unexpected in the best ways, managing to be both no-nonsense and vaguely eccentric.
If asked to recall what I remember of this novel I am sure I will answer: blue hair, mechanical horses, piano gubbins, sea urchins, oh and Isadora Duncan.
June 17, 2023
As human beings, we are often blind to ourselves. This is true for the heroine of the story, Elsa Anderson. At age 34, she is a celebrated classically trained pianist living in England. Elsa knows herself through her music, but she is not in touch with her feelings and her own personal history. For much of the novella, Elsa seems unmoored.
The time frame is the early days of the Covid pandemic. Elsa masks up like everyone else, but there is no sense of fear or anxiety about it. Early on, we learn that she has walked out of a solo performance of a Rachmaninoff Concerto, shocking her audience and hurting her career. She then takes a few jobs privately teaching young teens music, first in Athens and then in Paris. I found her encounters with the two teens to be some of the most interesting and real moments of the story.
I wanted to like Elsa, but at times, had difficulty believing that her character was real. Perhaps this was the author's intent. Part of the plot involves Elsa seeing her doppelganger. She herself does not always know what is real and what is imaginary. The author bends these lines.
As you can see, this is an intriguing story.
The time frame is the early days of the Covid pandemic. Elsa masks up like everyone else, but there is no sense of fear or anxiety about it. Early on, we learn that she has walked out of a solo performance of a Rachmaninoff Concerto, shocking her audience and hurting her career. She then takes a few jobs privately teaching young teens music, first in Athens and then in Paris. I found her encounters with the two teens to be some of the most interesting and real moments of the story.
I wanted to like Elsa, but at times, had difficulty believing that her character was real. Perhaps this was the author's intent. Part of the plot involves Elsa seeing her doppelganger. She herself does not always know what is real and what is imaginary. The author bends these lines.
As you can see, this is an intriguing story.
April 5, 2023
I didn’t feel any emotion while reading August Blue.
I just felt this to be deliberately mystifying (to no great affect) but also over-explained its images. In dream-like novels I think the reader should be trusted to puzzle out the connections between images+symbols themselves without the author spelling it out.
The Frozen reference was bizarre and distracting. I hope it was a inside joke for Levy. Lots of names starting with A.
The pandemic was mentioned often and it just limply hung there.
I just felt this to be deliberately mystifying (to no great affect) but also over-explained its images. In dream-like novels I think the reader should be trusted to puzzle out the connections between images+symbols themselves without the author spelling it out.
The Frozen reference was bizarre and distracting. I hope it was a inside joke for Levy. Lots of names starting with A.
The pandemic was mentioned often and it just limply hung there.
July 25, 2023
3.5 stars
Every Deborah Levy novel I read is like a puzzle box, and August Blue is no exception. Its premise is simple: Elsa, a pianist, is reeling from a major and very public professional setback when she encounters a woman whom she believes is her double. The premise, though, is not the point, but rather everything that surrounds and enriches it--that is to say, everything that Deborah Levy excels at: the motifs, the metaphors, the impressions, the refrains. In this particular novel, we have mechanical horses, sunflowers, pianos, sea urchins, Rachmaninov, a trilby hat, blue hair. These are the things that, together, make up the language that the novel speaks to us, the bits and pieces that you have to try and put together to understand the larger picture of August Blue. And Levy's style sits very comfortably in a narrative that's suffused with music because her writing is already so evocative of music: its smaller notes and chords, its larger harmonies and refrains--its overall composition.
And I do enjoy all of that: the way Levy's writing is always just a little bit disorienting, the way it always asks you to put in the work to figure it out. I think for me, though, August Blue's storyline didn't offer as strong a foundation as I wanted for Levy's impressionistic style. That is to say, I don't mind Levy's writing so long as it sits atop a larger plotline that feels at least somewhat defined or distinct (as with Hot Milk and its focus on the narrator's mother and her illness). With this particular novel, I found that larger plotline to be a little too loose and meandering, and that, for me, made the novel somewhat forgettable and hard to keep clear in my mind.
Qualms aside, though, August Blue still has those moments of startling insight and tenderness that keep me coming back to Levy's stories. There's this one refrain we get in the novel: "Maybe I am." It speaks to how the narrator, Elsa, is continually negotiating these different understandings of herself, going back and forth on who she thinks she is, or who she thought she was, or who she thinks she might be--and I think, ultimately, this refrain is emblematic of August Blue as a whole: it's a novel about uncertainty, about crisis (both personal and global), about what happens when the narrative you've built for yourself and put stock in suddenly becomes upended. Despite all of this, it's also a hopeful novel, one that sees a way forward even when it doesn't seem like there is one.
Thank you to Hamish Hamilton for providing me with an eARC of this via NetGalley!
"I let the stars enter my body and realized I had become porous. Everything that I was had started to unravel. I was living precariously in my own body; that is to say, I had not fallen into who I was, or who I was becoming. What I wanted for myself was a new composition."
Every Deborah Levy novel I read is like a puzzle box, and August Blue is no exception. Its premise is simple: Elsa, a pianist, is reeling from a major and very public professional setback when she encounters a woman whom she believes is her double. The premise, though, is not the point, but rather everything that surrounds and enriches it--that is to say, everything that Deborah Levy excels at: the motifs, the metaphors, the impressions, the refrains. In this particular novel, we have mechanical horses, sunflowers, pianos, sea urchins, Rachmaninov, a trilby hat, blue hair. These are the things that, together, make up the language that the novel speaks to us, the bits and pieces that you have to try and put together to understand the larger picture of August Blue. And Levy's style sits very comfortably in a narrative that's suffused with music because her writing is already so evocative of music: its smaller notes and chords, its larger harmonies and refrains--its overall composition.
And I do enjoy all of that: the way Levy's writing is always just a little bit disorienting, the way it always asks you to put in the work to figure it out. I think for me, though, August Blue's storyline didn't offer as strong a foundation as I wanted for Levy's impressionistic style. That is to say, I don't mind Levy's writing so long as it sits atop a larger plotline that feels at least somewhat defined or distinct (as with Hot Milk and its focus on the narrator's mother and her illness). With this particular novel, I found that larger plotline to be a little too loose and meandering, and that, for me, made the novel somewhat forgettable and hard to keep clear in my mind.
"It is so abject to express this loneliness within me. I am not sure I can take the freedom to find a language in music to reveal it. I have, after all, learned to conceal it. The old masters are my shield. Beethoven. Bach. Rachmaninov, Schumann. Their inner lives are valuable without measure."
Qualms aside, though, August Blue still has those moments of startling insight and tenderness that keep me coming back to Levy's stories. There's this one refrain we get in the novel: "Maybe I am." It speaks to how the narrator, Elsa, is continually negotiating these different understandings of herself, going back and forth on who she thinks she is, or who she thought she was, or who she thinks she might be--and I think, ultimately, this refrain is emblematic of August Blue as a whole: it's a novel about uncertainty, about crisis (both personal and global), about what happens when the narrative you've built for yourself and put stock in suddenly becomes upended. Despite all of this, it's also a hopeful novel, one that sees a way forward even when it doesn't seem like there is one.
Thank you to Hamish Hamilton for providing me with an eARC of this via NetGalley!
February 23, 2023
I am, quite possibly, clear on only one thing about August Blue and that is that I shall have to read it again to thoroughly understand it.
On the face of it we have Elsa, a brilliant concert pianist who, during a concert, stops playing Rachmaninoff and allows the composition that has been swirling in her own head to take over her fingers. Of course the conductor and her teacher, Arthur, see it as a breakdown of sorts. Thankfully whatever criticism she suffers is tempered with the onset of the pandemic and work for all musicians dries up in an instant. Elsa takes it upon herself to teach. Taking a job in Athens she crosses paths with a doppelganger who purchases something Elsa wants. There follows more encounters in Paris and London with Elsa finally heading to Sardinia where her teacher has decamped to find love.
The language is lyrical and draws you in. It is almost a kind of music in itself. Elsa is almost an unknowable character not even being clear on her own origins. Her interactions with other characters are curious as she seems to hold herself aloof from relationships of any kind.
This is my first Deborah Levy and despite its short length it certainly carries a lot of weight in its words. I feel like I've just touched the surface and I've missed so much. I simply feel the need to read it again because I'm curious to see what I've not picked up on.
I will certainly read more Levy whose work intrigues me very much.
On the face of it we have Elsa, a brilliant concert pianist who, during a concert, stops playing Rachmaninoff and allows the composition that has been swirling in her own head to take over her fingers. Of course the conductor and her teacher, Arthur, see it as a breakdown of sorts. Thankfully whatever criticism she suffers is tempered with the onset of the pandemic and work for all musicians dries up in an instant. Elsa takes it upon herself to teach. Taking a job in Athens she crosses paths with a doppelganger who purchases something Elsa wants. There follows more encounters in Paris and London with Elsa finally heading to Sardinia where her teacher has decamped to find love.
The language is lyrical and draws you in. It is almost a kind of music in itself. Elsa is almost an unknowable character not even being clear on her own origins. Her interactions with other characters are curious as she seems to hold herself aloof from relationships of any kind.
This is my first Deborah Levy and despite its short length it certainly carries a lot of weight in its words. I feel like I've just touched the surface and I've missed so much. I simply feel the need to read it again because I'm curious to see what I've not picked up on.
I will certainly read more Levy whose work intrigues me very much.
September 9, 2024
E se tivéssemos um duplo psíquico que nos perseguisse? Alguém de quem queremos algo e de quem guardamos algo, mesmo não sabendo quem é? Seremos talvez nós próprios tentando reinventar-nos?
Esta possibilidade é alimentada por uma pianista talentosa mas atormentada por ter sido abandonada pelos pais (a ênfase é sempre na mãe, neste caso). O abandono perdura e ressoa, criando estragos, mostrando que a sua marca é perene e difusa.
Não me apaixonei por este "August Blue" e tenho pena. Deborah Levy é muito original e surpreendente, algumas das suas frases e imagens são marcantes. Não consegui apreender, no entanto, o sentido das suas metáforas e da maior parte das personagens. Perdi-me nas suas idas e vindas e nos seus casos amorosos sem razão de ser. Julgo não ter decifrado a sua mensagem, embora tenha apreciado o tom misterioso.
"Do we have to defend ourselves against love?
Arthur had sent me a message: Every day I do not hear you play moves me closer to deaf."
(Lido em inglês)
Esta possibilidade é alimentada por uma pianista talentosa mas atormentada por ter sido abandonada pelos pais (a ênfase é sempre na mãe, neste caso). O abandono perdura e ressoa, criando estragos, mostrando que a sua marca é perene e difusa.
Não me apaixonei por este "August Blue" e tenho pena. Deborah Levy é muito original e surpreendente, algumas das suas frases e imagens são marcantes. Não consegui apreender, no entanto, o sentido das suas metáforas e da maior parte das personagens. Perdi-me nas suas idas e vindas e nos seus casos amorosos sem razão de ser. Julgo não ter decifrado a sua mensagem, embora tenha apreciado o tom misterioso.
"Do we have to defend ourselves against love?
Arthur had sent me a message: Every day I do not hear you play moves me closer to deaf."
(Lido em inglês)
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