The title of Deborah Levy’s new collection of essays might reference spoons but another domestic item comes to mind when describing the overall reading experience. There is something of the patchwork quilt about these short essays; they can be less than a page yet cover an amount of ground, including cultural criticism, the muses that helped shape Levy’s writing, deeply personal pieces on love and loss, whimsical lists of celebrity car crashes, an Alice in Wonderland take on immigrant woes, meditations on mortality, motherhood, gender and, through it all, like the thread that binds the individual patches, Levy’s restless intelligence probing the dark corners of the mind.
Many of the pieces were published as introductions to books, or newspaper and journal articles – nice to see the Munster-based journal Southword among the list – and there is a sense of randomness to the selection, which is not necessarily a criticism, just an observation. The Position of Spoons is a book to dip in and out of; you could lose an hour, an afternoon, in its considered prose, the distillation of decades of reading and writing, of Levy’s intellectual engagement with life on and off the page. Her thoughts on the French writer Violette Leduc could equally apply to Levy herself: “She is tuned in to the world with all her senses switched on. This is an extraordinary (and impossible) way of being in the world.”
Leduc was not a writer whose work I was familiar with, and this is one of the joys of the collection, the way Levy draws attention to lesser-known 20th-century female voices, in literature, art, music and photography. Other essays feature writers of renown: Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Levy’s affinity with the dystopias of JD Ballard, her appreciation of Marguerite Duras’s precision and the eroticism in the paintings of the Portuguese artist Paula Rego, the way she leaves space for the reader to interpret and to impose meaning, which reminds Levy of Jacques Lacan’s view of poetry: “The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom.”
The ability to think laterally and broadly across different artistic mediums is where Levy’s nous and sensibility are most impressively on show. The other success of this collection is her characteristic inventiveness with form. The author of the acclaimed “living autobiography” trilogy Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate, as well as the Booker-shortlisted novels Hot Milk and Swimming Home, brings to her critical writing that same sense of playfulness and originality.
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The enigmatic title shows up in a repurposing of the famous line in Eliot’s Prufrock, and in Levy’s belief that “all thoughts can be bent like a spoon”. Within the collection, the individual essays come with intriguing, sometimes bizarre headings: A to Z of the Death Drive; Charisma; Letter to a Stranger; A Roaming Alphabet for the Inner Voice. In most of the pieces, Levy combines critical opinion with personal details, flashes of colour that ground these musings in a life spent in thrall to art. Here she is on first seeing, as a teenager, an evocative photograph of the French writer Colette: “I do know it was a freezing December in 1973 and the central heating had broken down in our family house.”
This photo is included with the text, further personalising the connection, the dark, expressive eyes that looked out at Levy and beckoned her into the world of writing. Occasionally the essays pull back from the artistic world to the domestic, but even (or especially) here, Levy’s rigorous observation elevates the ordinary, the mundane: “The taste and fragrance of lemon rind has a totally different mood from its juice: the oil in the skin, particularly when it is used as a ‘twist’ for a dry vodka martini, is intense, deep, flamboyant, serene, while the juice is perhaps slightly neurotic.”
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For all lovers of culture, and writers in particular, The Position of Spoons has many gems. Levy’s lifelong interest in the work of Sigmund Freud is returned to in various essays, her own views on human behaviour and impulses often tallying with his own. We get a flavour of his consulting rooms in Berggasse 19, his seminal advances in the field of psychoanalysis, but because Levy is always writing into the modern moment, there is also acknowledgment that such advances haven’t protected girls and women from trauma, or indeed stopped them from self-harm.
Levy, who reminds us, towards the end of the collection, that the word “trauma” comes from the ancient Greek for “wound”, is the kind of writer who refuses to look away from life’s gory realities, preferring to delve deep inside.
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