eborah Levy’s books include three memoirs and eight novels, half of them published between 1989 and 1999, the other half since 2011, when her Booker-shortlisted, her novels “teem with oddness, with dreamlike, vertiginous scenes … in search of a haunting from their past”. When she was again shortlisted for the Booker in 2016 with, a judge said the novel’s “symbolic richness and mythic complexity ... is also underpinned by a wicked humour: it’s like Virginia Woolf with good jokes”.
She calls it “messing up”, and it is, because it’s in front of a large audience, but the novel itself refutes those deliberately flat words. That piece of music was written to help Rachmaninov break the paralysis of depression; Elsa’s journey reflects something of that. The piano, for her, is a connection to her unknown mother, as well as an instrument to lift her out of the humble home of her foster parents and into the bigger home of art.
in my 20s when I was making the transition from theatre writing to prose, which was such a pleasure. By, I’m becoming interested in how you can’t subvert a reality unless you establish one, which is what surrealist paintings do – a big influence on me, as they were for Ballard. Dalí’s lobster phone wouldn’t work unless you knew it was a telephone. I became interested in the uncanny; in how to make narrative porous; in the importance of what you leave out. You could call it spectral realism.