book review: august blue by deborah levy
it felt like a chore to read. i could’ve dropped it at any point and keep it in my bookshelf. but it had wide margins and a big font so i thought "might as well get it over and done with"
here's the blurb:
At the height of her career, the piano virtuoso Elsa M. Anderson―former child prodigy, now in her thirties―walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance.
Now she is in Athens, watching an uncannily familiar woman purchase a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa wants the horses too, but there are no more for sale. She drifts to the ferry port, on the run from her talent and her history.
So begins her journey across Europe, shadowed by the elusive woman who seems to be her double. A dazzling portrait of melancholy and metamorphosis, Deborah Levy’s August Blue uncovers the ways in which we seek to lose an old story, find ourselves in others and create ourselves anew”
i thought “doubles” would be interesting. but it turns out, to me, that this falls on the category of - this has potential but it was executed poorly.
the characters were fleeting. they didn't offer much to the plot or left a lasting impression. the flow of the story was alright.
i tried to get lost in it. but maybe this book isn’t for that. i tried to get to know it. i noticed the way the dialogues were written were indistinguishable from the narration. there weren’t any “quotation marks ” as an indicator of a beginning of a speech and an end. i had to guess and figure it out myself. i also noticed 2 or 3 misspelled words. there’s a separate conversation between the protagonist and her double conversing in her head. sometimes it made sense, sometimes they felt so random. on that note, reading the book felt like reading different drafts or notes slapped on the same paragraph.
the book was messy. i tried to get to know it. but the more i tried, the more i grumbled in my head. i was growing impatient. i kept feeling how much more pages i have to read. every time i look at the book when i pass by it, it felt like homework. even the books we analysed at school were more interesting than this. it’s my first deborah levy book, and i learned her writing isn’t my taste.