Swimming Home
Deborah Levy, 2011
Bloomsbury USA
176 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781620401699
Summary
Shortlisted - 2012 Man Booker Prize
As he arrives with his family at the villa in the hills above Nice, Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive.
She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe's enigmatic wife allow her to remain?
A subversively brilliant study of love, Swimming Home reveals how the most devastating secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1959
• Where—South Africa
• Education—Dartington College of Arts
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK
Deborah Levy, born in South Africa, is is a British playwright, novelist, and poet. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company and she is the author of several novels including, Swimming Home and Hot Milk, both of which were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Life
Levy's father was a member of the African National Congress and an academic and historian. The family emigrated to Wembley Park, in 1968. Her parents divorced in 1974.
Work
Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts, leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, including Pax, Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and others which are published in Levy: Plays 1 (Methuen). She also served as director and writer for Manact Theatre Company in Cardiff, Wales.
Her first novel Beautiful Mutants, came out in 1986; her second, Swallowing Geography, in 1993; and her third, Billy and Girl, in 1996.
Swimming Home, her 2011 novel, was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. It was also shortlisted for the UK Author of the Year prize at the 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards and for the 2013 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize.
Levy published a short story collection, Black Vodka, which was shortlisted for the BBC International Short Story Award 2012, and in 2016 she released her fourth novel, Hot Milk, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
She has always written across a number of art forms (including collaborations with visual artists) and was a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989 to 1991. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/24/2014.)
Book Reviews
Levy's elegant language and subtle, uncanny plot are strictly adult fare…Levy creates perfectly realistic scenes that erupt in flashes of disorienting hostility and the non sequiturs of dreams…The seductive pleasure of Levy's prose stems from its layered brilliance. These are deceptively simple scenes…but they all reward rereading. Levy moves her characters in and out of focus, always one step ahead of our sympathies, ready at any point to disrupt a conversation with some evocative revelation.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
From the first brief chapters of Deborah Levy's spare, disturbing and frequently funny novel, which was a finalist for this year's Man Booker Prize, we sense that things will turn out badly…As we continue reading, we realize that Swimming Home is unlike anything but itself. Its originality lies in its ellipses, its patterns and repetitions, in what it discloses and reveals, and in the peculiar curio cabinet Levy has constructed…Readers will have to resist the temptation to hurry up in order to find out what happens…because Swimming Home should be read with care…Our reward is the enjoyable, if unsettling, experience of being pitched into the deep waters of Levy's wry, accomplished novel.
Francine Prose - New York Times Book Review
Here is an excellent story, told with the subtlety and menacing tension of a veteran playwright.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
Wholly new, fresh and yes, profound.... [Swimming Home] floats like a wasp, and stings like one too.
Tucker Shaw - Denver Post
This perfectly written, expertly crafted short book…[is] so well done and so clever.
Chicago Tribune
Exquisite.... Levy’s sense of dramatic form, as she hastens us toward the grim finale, is unerring, and her precise, dispassionate prose effortlessly summons people and landscapes.
The New Yorker
Levy is a keenly attentive writer, alive to the hyperreal nature of things, her prose achieving a hallucinatory quality as things seem to float out of the characters’ minds and into the text … Levy manipulates light and shadow with artfulness. She transfixes the reader: we recognize … the thing of darkness in us all. This is an intelligent, pulsating literary beast.
Telegraph (UK)
A statement on the power of the unsaid … Levy’s cinematic clarity and momentum … convey confusion with remarkable lucidity.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
Witty and poignant.
Sunday Times (UK)
One of the finest new novels I have read (and already reread) in a long time … it radiates the sensual languor of sun-drenched afternoons in the south of France and the disquieting, uncanny beauty only perceived by a true daytime insomniac.
Guardian (UK)
Allusive, elliptical and disturbing…Often funny and always acute…Swimming Home reminded me of Virginai Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Although a short work, it has an epic quality. This is a prizewinner.
Independent (UK)
Swimming Home is a beautiful, delicate book underpinned by a complexity that only reveals itself slowly to the reader.
Financial Times (UK)
(Starred review. )Levy winds her characters up and watches them go, and they do as most humans do, which is to mess up in the face of desire. Her novel is utterly beautiful and lyrical throughout, even at the most tragic turns…. A shortlisted nominee for the Man Booker Prize, deserving of the widest readership.
Booklist
Kitty Finch...is staggeringly beautiful..., unclothed...and has designs on Joe Jacobs.... Levy winds her characters up and watches them go, and they do as most humans do, which is to mess up in the face of desire. Her novel is utterly beautiful and lyrical.... [D]eserving of the widest readership.
Kirkus Reviews
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