Swimming Home (Levy) - Book Reviews

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