05/04/19: Deborah Levy – Early Levy: Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography (2014)

This is a bind-up of two short, early novels.

Beautiful Mutants (1989):

A bunch of seemingly unrelated characters often given nicknames (The Banker, The Anorexic Anarchist, The Innocents and so on) float through the narrative seemingly without purpose.

This is an unusual novel in that it seems so disjointed, with surreal and often violent episodes depicted in poetic language. The way the characters speak is completely unrealistic – and presumably intentionally so:

“This fish has the possessed eye of a poet and tastes just as useless. In fact it tastes like a melancholy misfit. I have always hated poetry, I prefer hard mathematics or even hard drugs. Do you really think that in consuming this pescado I would consume its ideas? I have spat them out again and again. And what is The Idea? That there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird? Give it to me, I’ll take it to the market and show you sixty ways of looking at it. Poets are fuckwits. They try and legislate with language but they don’t have the roubles to bribe. On my aunt’s salmon farm they stroke the belly of hen salmon to squeeze out their eggs for breeding. Well, I have squeezed you out too.”

Certainly no one speaks like this:

“I own a prestige apartment facing the sparkle of the river, with south-facing views, a private car park, porter, video security, entry phone, swimming pool and a sauna to nurture my health, which is after all my wealth. I am given all this for good reason. I am valued; I am an irresistible proposition to men in parliaments and tycoons on committees and entrepreneurs of all kinds; my condom case bulges with the promise of liaison and adventure. I am the new pioneer; the great adventure of my generation is to destabilize everything and everyone.”

I don’t think it’s meant to be realistic. It’s a novel of ideas, constructed out of experimental language, jamming in jarring images, phrases, situations and thoughts. But I found it too incoherent to get much out of it, which I accept may be my failing as a reader.

Swallowing Geography (1993):

The second novel is no more rewarding. J.K. (a reference to Jack Kerouac) travels through seemingly unrelated scenes and locations. Again, it’s very disjointed. If anything, it becomes even more abstract as it goes on. There are characters called B, H, X, Y and Z. Levy may be trying to deconstruct identity and reveal it to be fluid and ever-shifting. But once that point has been made, what of it?

Again the language is poetic and even beautiful, but the fragmentary conversations and observations don’t add up to a great deal.

I loved Swimming Home, The Cost of Living and Hot Milk, so found this very disappointing indeed.