When Deborah Levy talks about her two daughters in her Autobiography in motionit is always in very tender terms. She sends us the image of three women who are close, accomplices.
It is a completely different mother-daughter relationship that the writer depicts in Hot Milkthe novel that earned him a finalist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2016, and which is finally coming to us in French.
The relationship between Rose and Sofia is one of codependency. Rose has a strange bone disease that no one can diagnose. She can no longer walk and only gets around in a wheelchair. Sofia takes care of her mother, moving her, massaging her legs, putting up with her mood swings, anxiety and anger.
The daughter is obsessed with understanding what is eating away at her mother, and the mother invades her daughter’s life, a powerful metaphor for an unhealthy mother-daughter relationship.
The plot of the novel takes place mainly in a small village in Andalusia where Rose goes to consult Dr.r Gomes.
Little by little, this doctor with dubious practices will become more interested in the daughter than in the mother, encouraging her to live her life to the fullest, to detach herself from Rose.
In a flash of lucidity, he will say to Sofia: you are using your mother as a shield to prevent you from living your life.
The mother-daughter relationship and motherhood are recurring and inexhaustible themes in literature.
With her lively, sensitive and intelligent pen, Deborah Levy avoids banality and clichés by offering us a subtle novel, filled with dreamlike scenes, rich in metaphors and angles of analysis.
His characters are complex and their behavior is never telegraphed.
When Sofia goes to Athens to visit her father who abandoned her as a teenager and who – classic! – has rebuilt his life with a much younger woman with whom he had a child, there will be no great reunion or repair between the two, the debt is too great. There is rather the painful realization, on Sofia’s part, that there is no more room for her in this family reconstruction. Faced with her father’s selfishness, she questions her own.
Aren’t we all acting in our own interests? asks Deborah Levy, who offers us here one of the must-read novels of the summer.
Hot Milk
Basement Editions
311 pages