With the plurality of her narrative identity in mind, it should be said that her introduction to the group was not quite as easy as I may have suggested. Kitty is by far the most interesting character in the book-a young woman onto whom everyone, even Kitty, projects an image. But the caretaker…’ Isabel invites her to stay, and from there this novel of high symbolic charge bolts forth. Kitty introduces herself and explains: ‘I thought I was staying here from this Saturday for a fortnight. Instead it belongs to Kitty Finch, the perfectly naked young woman whose ‘breasts were surprisingly full and round for someone so thin.’ Right from the beginning, we find Eros and Thanatos swimming in the same pool again. When the body emerges safe and sound, they find that it does not belong to a bear, as they’d initially worried. They notice a body floating near the deep end of the pool. Joe Jacobs, a famous poet, is sitting by the pool with his wife (Isabel), his daughter (Nina), and another couple (Mitchell, Laura) whom Isabel has invited. The novel opens on a Saturday afternoon in the south of France. The two sides, which each run to seventeen syllables, are sewn together by both repetition (‘emergency’/ ‘emergency’) and rhyme (‘emergency’/‘me’).ĭeborah Levy has apparently been writing sentences this way since 1989, but her name was not widely known until she was shortlisted for the 2012 Booker Prize for Swimming Home, a short elliptical novel for which the sentence examined above could easily serve as epigraph.

To take just one example, from the title story of her new collection, Black Vodka, where the narrator says: ‘I muttered something about being summoned to an emergency and left quickly before Tom could point out that the emergency was me.’ Here we have a dialectically structured sentence, whose thesis ends extends to the word ‘and’, on which the line pivots before starting into its antithesis. Instead she returns to the beginning of the sentence or paragraph, proceeding slowly from the top, and it becomes clear to all that we are listening to a writer who places a poet’s value on the rhythm of her prose. On the three occasions that she slips up, she does not simply correct herself and continue from there, as most of us surely would.

In an online interview with Granta magazine, Deborah Levy reads a passage from her latest novel, Swimming Home.

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy