Hot Milk: Deborah Levy

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We looked at Colette’s father, and now if we look at Mr Ramsay, he is a self-pitying philosopher whose mind is rather cold and rational, and he is selfish and self dramatizing. Mrs Ramsay is portrayed by Woolf as beautiful and warm, intuitive and the centre of the household, but also very controlling. The really excellent thing about that first section of To the Lighthouse, which revolves around the relationship of Mr and Mrs Ramsay, is that they love each other. They really are in love. I think that’s always the best position to write from. In that relationship, Woolf is writing from a position of love, with all its complexities.

Deborah wrote and published her first novel BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS (Vintage), when she was 27 years old. The experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret, was so exhilarating, she wrote a few more. These include, SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY, THE UNLOVED (Vintage) and BILLY and GIRL (Bloomsbury). She has always written across a number of art forms (see Bookworks and Collaborations with visual artists) and was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991. Restless, listless, sleepless and penniless, Sofia Papastergiadis, the heroine of Deborah Levy’s gorgeous new novel, “Hot Milk,” feels about as miserable and alarmed as it is possible to feel. We meet her just after she drops her laptop on the floor, shattering both the screen and the illusion of well-being. You’ve chosen motherhood in literature as your theme; first of all, please can we talk a little about the mother in your new novel Hot Milk?verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

A Deborah Levy— My father is Jewish, and his parents were Lithuanians who came to South Africa and owned a fish shop. And then my lovely grandmother Leah decided that she stunk of fish and that she would go into lingerie. I’ve always loved that mix of fish and lingerie.A Deborah Levy— Well, her writerly attention is always in an interesting place. She had an impoverished childhood in Vietnam and this was explored in her novel The LoveR. It is here in her masterpiece, published when she was 70, that you will find one of the most devastating seductions ever written. A teenage white girl has an affair with a Chinese financier, and it’s not just an erotic forbidden sexual encounter, it’s an essay on how colonialism messes everyone up. Duras is a totally unsentimental, mind-blowing writer, and the formal design of her fiction is often beautifully cinematic because she wrote and directed for film too. I think it would be much better for all of us to love the mother herself, and not the delusion. Is that possible?