Few British writers are as adept as Deborah Levy at enacting Hilary Mantel’s advice to writers: to make the reader “feel acknowledged, and yet estranged”. Levy’s approachable but oblique novels look like realism, but come riddled with psychological trapdoors and unstable narratives, while her trilogy of memoirs takes the reader in hand more directly. Her new book – a collection of 34 essays, stories and short texts too unclassifiable to be labelled – combines the best of both approaches.
The first impression we get of Levy in The Position of Spoons and Other Intimacies is as a great enthusiast – for everything. Literature, of course, but also art, clothes, Freud and even the beauty of the lemons on her dining table, “happy in their own skin”. The literature about which she enthuses is of a particular kind – that which rejects “dull and dulling language”, which bursts out of the “oak-panelled 19th-century gentleman’s club” of literary tradition and makes things new.
