David's Reviews > August Blue

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.