Deborah Levy is best known for her “moving autobiography”, a very free trilogy in which she recounts, among other things, the end of her marriage at the dawn of her fifties, her life alone with her two daughters and the material conditions which condition the creative act.
For the first two parts, What I don’t want to know And The cost of living (Basement Ed., 2020), the English writer received the 2020 Foreign Femina Prize. The last, State of play (Sous-Sol, 2021), an intimate meditation on similar themes, combined the quest for freedom and the vital need to reinvent oneself.
Born in 1959 in Johannesburg, South Africa, Deborah Levy emigrated to the United Kingdom at the age of nine, after her father, an anti-apartheid activist of Jewish origin, had spent a few years in prison – a traumatic event that pushed her towards writing. Poet, playwright and novelist, only one of his eight novels, Under water (Flammarion, 2015), has so far been translated into French.
The position of the spoon. And other impertinent pleasures is composed of texts brought together for the first time, originally published in English-language journals and magazines. A necessarily messy primer, in which you can find a bit of everything.
Happiness ? In a letter addressed to her mother, when she was dying in the hospital, she recalled “how the pressure that we are put to be constantly happy can make us unhappy in silence while everyone else is happy. noisy “. Later, she tells how she fell in love with Colette “before reading a single one of her books” or confesses her admiration for Marguerite Duras.
Elsewhere, she praises the ” creepers ‘, perhaps the most iconic shoe in rock fashion, from the Rolling Stones to The Cure (now worn by Rihanna), that never looks better than without socks. “I have always been certain that the men and women who wear their shoes without socks have everything to become my friends and my lovers. “In particular because not “to put on socks is to be lively and light. Not putting on socks is not pretending to believe that love lasts forever.
Between a declaration of love with lemons and an essay on the photographer Francesca Woodman, who, “like all girls and all women, wants to escape the frame”, Deborah Levy also pays a powerful tribute to the writer JG Ballard (Crash!, The Empire of the Sun).
There is also a beautiful text dedicated to the author of the bastard,Violette Leduc, for whom, she recalls, the end of a love story also marks the end of a tyranny.
His position on oral sex? “An awesome sport that should be part of the Olympics. Unlike javelin throwing or high jumping, anyone can do it. And we never had to destroy a single house to build a stadium there to practice this sport. »
Impertinent, eclectic, full of humanity, always despite herself with a touch of joy and wisdom. What we love about Deborah Levy is that the ordinary is never, precisely, ordinary.