A young woman in an Athens flea market sees a stranger buy two mechanical horses, which dance when their tails are pulled up. Both women are wearing the same coat, a green trench, tightly belted. The watcher, too, covets the horses. As she greedily observes the transaction, she is compelled by the sense that she is looking at herself, “that she and I were the same person. She was me and I was her.”
From Dostoevsky to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the doppelganger is among the delights of literature and film alike. In The Jolly Corner by Henry James, a man nightly stalks an empty house, certain it is inhabited by a ghastly version of himself, the person he would have become if he hadn’t escaped New York. Long before Freud began talking about repressed memories and unacknowledged impulses, the doppelganger was a way of understanding a divided self, in which certain vital parts have been disallowed or smothered at birth. It can represent evil impulses or unwanted memories, long buried and rapping for attention.
In the case of Elsa M Anderson, the watching woman in the Athens flea market, the encounter with the doppelganger is the second staging post in a deeply Freudian fable of lost memory and severed selves. Elsa is a famous concert pianist who has come to Athens in the wake of a catastrophe. Three weeks earlier, she performed Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 in the Golden Hall in Vienna, lost her place in the music and walked off stage mid-performance, an unforgivable act. Now she is drifting around Europe, teaching the children of people wealthy enough to afford her services and trying to grapple with the mystery of who she really is.
Elsa’s origins are uncertain and somehow in 34 years it has never occurred to her to probe them more deeply. At the age of six, she was adopted by an exacting teacher, the diminutive genius Arthur Goldstein, who took her, fairytale fashion, from foster parents in Suffolk when her talent became unmistakable. He provided her with a new name (the M stands for Miracle) and sculpted/bullied the child prodigy into an adult star. It was only when she found herself physically unable to play that Elsa began to notice the world beyond her piano, to question the past and future instead of sheltering in the present-tense trance of performance. And now the doppelganger keeps reappearing, with her cigar and snakeskin heels, pursuing Elsa from Athens to London to Paris, forcing her to confront the locked box of her identity.
Since the 1990s, Deborah Levy’s novels have combined a gauzy, episodic quality with pinpoint sensual detail drawn from peripatetic lives, crossing fluently between languages and national borders. Her style is full of gaps and sharp edges, circling around questions of gender and power, inheritance, autonomy and lack. This procedure gained a new intensity in the Living Autobiography trilogy that began in 2013 with Things I Don’t Want to Know and there’s a slightly looking-glass quality to re-encountering the same glamorously ordinary spaces transmitted back into fiction once again. Turkish eggs in Green Lanes, swimming pools in Paris, conversations with friends who drift around the globe from Greek islands to New York City concert halls.
The narrative here has a fittingly musical quality, running forward in spurts, pausing, repeating key phrases. Something important has been forgotten and M also stands for Mother, an absence Elsa has never brought herself to examine. Before her mortifying breakdown on stage, Elsa dyed her hair blue, a somatic status update that takes months to percolate to conscious level. The repressed is returning, as it is wont to do, and its eruptions connect her with her own lost childhood. Her original name resurfaces, followed by a vivid daisy-chain of memories. As in The Jolly Corner, the doppelganger’s continued presence is an invitation to consider what might have been split off or forgone; what type of adult Elsa actually wants to become.
The least satisfying element of August Blue is the trim, textbook nature of these Freudian mechanics, their compliance to orderly, orthodox progression. There’s something a little too neat about Elsa as a case history, her hysterical interlude tidily resolved as lost memories surface and are integrated. I’m not sure it quite works like that in reality. Healing goes off half-cocked, memories stick around like a thorn in the side. But the wistful, fabular quality is appealing, as are those aphoristic statements Levy is so skilled at dispensing: sly comments on contemporary power dynamics likewise in the process of changing into new and as yet uncertain forms: “It was always the same people making the same old”; “It had never occurred to her, she said, that she wasn’t valuable”; “Capitalism sold a flat white to me as if it were a cup of freedom.”
Olivia Laing’s latest book is Everybody: A Book About Freedom (Picador)
August Blue by Deborah Levy is published by Hamish Hamilton (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Everybody by Olivia Laing (Pan Macmillan, £10.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
