“Hot Milk”, by Deborah Levy, translated from English by Céline Leroy, Le sous-sol, 320 p., €22.50, digital €16.
Water is Deborah Levy’s element. Her readers know that the author ofState of play swims as often as possible and dreams of a house by the sea or a lake. Discovering Hot Milk (“hot milk”), we think that his writing in short sentences itself has something aquatic. An appearance of simplicity, a displayed clarity that is blurred in a flash. An ability to carry, under the transparency of its surface, contrary currents, sometimes violent. A way, finally, to absorb sounds, to attenuate them, which encourages us to listen and sharpens our attention. All qualities which partly contribute to the hypnotic power of this novel, published in its original version in 2016, now superbly translated by Céline Leroy – already at work for the autobiographical trilogy composed of What I don’t want to know, The cost of living And State of play (The Basement, 2020 and 2021), this existential and material triad which has renewed the genre of autofiction and established Deborah Levy, born in 1959, as a writer as admired by her peers as she is loved by a wide audience.
Despite its title, there is much more water than milk in Hot Milk. The sea is oily off the coast of Almeria, Spain. This is where the British Sofia Papastergiadis, during the month of August 2015, accompanied her mother, Rose, to treat pain which appeared and disappeared depending on the circumstances but most of the time prevented her from walking. They made Sofia, 25, his slave, forcing her to stop her anthropology thesis. Rose, a native of Yorkshire, mortgaged her house to pay the $25,000 requested by Doctor Gomez to welcome her into his majestic marble clinic.
During this forced vacation, Sofia swims, ignoring the flags announcing the massive presence of jellyfish, and gets stung. What else ? In terms of spectacular twists and turns, not much; Sofia declares herself “anti main plot”, a trend shared by Deborah Levy. Its narrator has an affair with a German woman and a Spanish man. She leaves for Athens to find her father, whom she has not seen since childhood. He has just married a young woman and had a baby. She tries to follow the injunctions to cultivate her “fearlessness”. She observes the world around her with the perspective of an anthropologist which often gives her insight and humor, but does not exclude eclipses of lucidity – anthropologists too have their “belief system”.
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