Sun, Suffering and Savagery

Letters

Vol. 34 No. 19 · 11 October 2012

From Kirsty Gunn

To read Deborah Levy’s Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home as though it were a version of ‘a holiday poolside tragedy’, as Jenny Turner does, is to miss the point of a stunningly original writer’s literary project (LRB, 27 September). Since Beautiful Mutants (1989), her first work of fiction, Levy has created stories that are not concerned with the mimetic and summative. The traditional novel, that fictional set-up rigid with narratological priorities, has never been Levy’s thing. Instead, go back to all those items in Swimming Home that Turner lists for us, the sugar mice and cherry print bikini – those words. That is where the action of this book is, the author creating stuff on the page for readers to bump up against and try and figure out. On the page is where Levy’s stories and characters happen: in words, not in the spooling out of plot and character development, representations of scenarios that may or may not be familiar, may or may not be sparked by some drug or other that may or may not have been prescribed in the period in which the novel is set. The only time that’s real is the time of our reading and what we make of our response to all these curious nouns and verbs and adjectives that are happening in the sentences. ‘I have that continuous uncomfortable feeling of “things” in the head, like icebergs or rocks or awkwardly shaped pieces of furniture,’ Elizabeth Bishop wrote. That’s how to approach the remarkable piece of high modernism that is Swimming Home. We were never supposed to just sit there. Take a breath. Go under.

Kirsty Gunn
London W6