Book Review: Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

Original jacket

'When Kitty Finch took her hand off the steering wheel and told him she loved him, he no longer knew if she was threatening him or having a conversation.'

For lovers of witty, arresting, unsettling prose – prose that reads like the best poetry - Swimming Home is a rare delight. The marriage of unashamedly literary and eminently readable books has become a hallmark of And Other Stories (the independent publishers of this novel) and Swimming Home is another masterpiece. From this first sentence, which introduces the feel of lives running out of control, of impending danger and lust and transformation, Deborah Levy produces a short page-turning cliff-hanger of rare brilliance.

On the surface, Swimming Home is riddled with clichés in both characters and plot – it is essentially a family drama populated by wealthy, artistically inclined characters whose lives are falling apart until the arrival of a mysterious stranger who throws everything into chaos – yet Levy takes these familiar elements and crafts them into something new. There is barely a sentence that didn’t produce some physical reaction in me as I read it. The writing is a firework spectacular. You feel the words, engage with them emotionally and sensually as well as intellectually. They rise around you, come alive in your mind, transport you to new and unexpected places. Deborah Levy creates a hallucinatory dreamscape of colours and symbols and metaphors, a psychoanalysts playground where every word, image, and object is significant and post-Freudian ideas of sex and death drive the plot forward. Swimming Home is a concentrated study of psychological states, of perceptions of depression and the impact diagnosis and medication can have on lives.

The Jacobs – celebrated poet Joe, war-correspondent Isobel, and their 14 year-old daughter only-daughter Nina – are holidaying in the south of France with Isobel’s friend Laura and her husband Mitchell. The atmosphere is taught and competitive, barely buried marital strife, infidelity, financial concerns, and work-life inequalities rife amongst the adults. It looks like being a long summer, particularly for Nina. That is, until they wake one morning to find Kitty Finch floating naked in their pool, red hair and green nails, arms pointing ahead like a starfish, like a superhero. Marshall mistakes her for a bear. She has confused her booking dates. Isobel invites her to stay. The mermaid steps out of the water to disrupt their plans and guide them through their summer. She is a poet and she is quirky, fun, psychologically unstable. She quickly becomes the centrifugal force around whom the other characters circle.

'Standing next to Kitty Finch was like being near a cork that had just popped out of a bottle. The first pop when gasses seem to escape and everything is sprinkled for one second with something intoxicating.'

Yet Kitty is no femme fatal; she is as vulnerable as they are, entranced by the poet she has read and the words he has given her. She and Joe are united by their experience of depression and antidepressants. ‘Give me your history and I will give you something to take it away’, he has written about his experiences of medication as a teenager. There is a theme here, between knowledge and forgetting; the amnesia that Joe and Kitty resent is contrasted with longing to forget that Isobel as a war-correspondent exposed to knowledge of the bleakest things in life dreams of. The reader quickly realises that there will be things learned on this holiday that will change things for everyone.

Levy borrows a technique from Emily Bronte in telling a tale about women through the façade of a male central character. The women are not always likeable, but they are powerful, compelling and determine their own stories, act in their own ways, without translation by male sensibility. Gender roles aren’t simple. On the surface, Joe is a typically serially unfaithful bipolar poet, yet he also plays the role of sole parent to Nina when Isobel is away. The women are enigmatic, the scope of behaviours available to them broader than in many novels.

Readers will feel all sorts of artistic spirits in the background – Ali Smith’s The Accidental, Arthur Miller plays, van Gogh paintings, Wuthering Heights, Rebecca were just some of those that arose for me – but Swimming Home owes its compelling brilliance to the fearsome intellect and lyrical prowess of its author.  There is little to criticise here. That it was turned down by a host of mainstream publishers for being too literary for a tough economic climate says much about the uncertain, fearful, artistically confused publishing world of the moment, and their – sometimes - lack of faith in readers. I'm delighted that the Booker Prize has reflected the rise of exciting small publishers in its shortlist for 2012.

Swimming Home is an elliptical novel. Time shifts and disorientates, narrative focus moves between characters. Scenes and motifs repeat and evolve. ‘Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely,’ Kitty says on multiple occasions. ‘But you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all.’

Liminality dominates. Swimming Home is perilous, teetering on the brink of dream and wakefulness, of metaphor and literal, of medicated health and unmedicated madness, of childhood and adulthood, of life and death. Water is both a refuge and a prison. Dive in, submerge yourself, and feel it surround you.

Swimming Home was originally published by And Other Stories in October 2011. ISBN 9781908276025. 
Since Booker longlisting, it has been republished to meet demand by And Other Stories and Faber & Faber. ISBN 9780571299607, 176pp.

Book Review: Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos (Translated by Rosalind Harvey)

 ‘I love three-cornered hats, because they’re mad soldiers hats. You put one on and you feel like running off all on your own to invade the nearest kingdom.’

Down the Rabbit Hole is a masterpiece unlike anything I have ever read. Like a world-class soufflé it is subtle, complex and challenging in its depth of flavour yet light and airy in the mouth. At sixty-eight pages, it is barely a novella, and yet it is hard to believe more could be packed into those few pages. I’ve laughed uncontrollably each time I’ve read it. Wit oozes from every sentence. And yet the comedy is blacker than night; for all the charm this is also a disquieting and tragic picture of life and a biting satire that turns many of the giggles to ash in your mouth.

Tochtli – our narrator, his name means ‘rabbit’ in Nahuatl, Mexico’s main indigenous language - is a young boy growing up with his drug baron father in their palatial Mexican compound. He loves hats, is fascinated with samurais, guillotines and the French Revolution, and what he most dreams of is a Liberian Pygmy Hippopotamus to add to his menagerie of wild animals. He’s as precocious as he is unworldly. Each night before he goes to bed he reads the dictionary and learns difficult words. Some of his favourites are sordid, disastrous, immaculate, pathetic, devastating and enigmatic; they form the lexicon with which he understands his life and horizons and the basis of his narration.

The problem for Tochtli is that his horizons are disastrously limited. His father, Yolcaut, is as paranoid and protective towards Tochtli as he is devastating to his enemies. Tochtli is not allowed to leave the palace, has no-one his own age to play with, and knows only thirteen or fourteen people in total. He’s not sure which it is because sometimes he can’t be sure whether people he knows are still alive or not, Add in the dead and he’d know more people,
‘Seventeen or more. Twenty easily. But dead people don’t count, because the dead aren’t people, they’re corpses.’

Yolcaut’s gang is the most macho for at least eight kilometres. They bribe, they traffic drugs, they have rooms packed with guns and they feed their victims to the tigers. Anything might happen and anything goes. Down the Rabbit Hole is a fantastical world, a nightmarish inversion of Alice in Wonderland that oscillates between realism and surrealism and by presenting such polar opposites manages to achieve both simultaneously. The genius lies in the way in which it is narrated. Imagine a more completely realised version of the child narrator of Room – or Alice herself – telling a narcoliteratura tale of guns and gangs and drugs and girls and you have an idea of what it is like. Adam Thirlwell describes it in his introduction as ‘a deliberate, wild attack on the conventions of literature.’  But where some experiments with form and perspective could feel academic or cold, this is as warm and engaging as one could hope for.

Tochtli is delightful. He has a pure visceral enthusiasm for life and knowledge and he recounts what he sees with macabre matter-of-fact vibrancy, without commentating on what he sees. It is his incomplete understanding of the world around him that injects the humour and pathos into what takes place. He sees things in black and white and by responding to them in a logical way, looks beyond nuance to see the bigger picture somehow more clearly. Because he is such a floored narrator the reader is encouraged to look beyond, to interpret and read between the lines of his sordid tale. What one finds there can make for uncomfortable reading.

With Yolcaut he plays a game where:
‘one person says a number of bullets in a part of the body and the other one answers: alive, corpse, or too early to tell.
‘One bullet in the heart.’
‘Corpse.’
‘Thirty bullets in the little toenail of the left foot.’
‘Alive.’
‘Three bullets in the pancreas.’
‘Too early to tell.’'

Poor Tochtli wants to be macho like the rest of the gang (the only other option in his understanding is to be a faggot) and he makes a pretty good effort at it. His view of the world can often be shocking and alarming. But he can’t be as macho as he wants to be. He’s vulnerable, pathetic even, and without any power over his life or surroundings. He suffers crippling psycho-somatic stomach aches because he is allowed to cry when he’s ill without being called a faggot. At one point he becomes mute in effort to control his little world. In Transactional Analysis terms, he is a textbook case of an Adapted Child, and Yolcaut an adult incapable of being a parent. It’s a disastrous cycle of violence begetting violence, emotional damage begetting emotional damage. As Tochtli says in the opening pages, ‘I think at the moment my life is a little bit sordid. Or pathetic.’ Later he goes even further, describing himself as ‘the most pathetic person in the whole universe’. The tragedy of the book is that he is, unfortunately, for once correct.

And all the while nagging themes of imperialism and failed democracy play out in the background. Villalobos has said that he wanted to write a book without moralisations about a subject that has been moralised too much. He achieves that and so much more. His exceptional control over Tochtli’s narration – he only ever mentions that which is of interest to him, no extra world-building, no wider context or history; hence the novels short length – create a claustrophobic, intense novella and he writes from a child’s perspective amazingly well. Added to this Rosalind Harvey’s adroit and inspired translation and you have a novel that refracts major social issues through the eyes of a young boy, creating a strange, momentous, crazy hybrid that delights and rewards on every page. In Tochtli’s words, Down the Rabbit Hole is an immaculate, enigmatic, and devastating book.


Down the Rabbit Hole (ISBN: 9781908276001) was published in 2011 by And Other Stories, a wonderful new publisher set-up on exciting and idealistic principles. They operate on an ethical, not-for-profit basis, decide what to publish based on feedback from readers, and believe that great new books will be heard about and read thanks to the combined intelligence of people. They publish four books a year, and subscribers receive numbered first editions and a thanks in the back of each book.
To find out more about And Other Stories, or to subscribe, see www.andotherstories.org