Levy - Black Vodka: Ten Stories

Dont miss Deborah Levys other sharp, insightful, and eloquent books:

Swimming Home: A Novel

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

Two families gather at a villa in the hills above Nice. When they arrive, theres a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She walks naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday.

Exquisite.The New Yorker

Readers will have to resist the temptation to hurry up in order to find out what happens... Our reward is the enjoyable, if unsettling, experience of being pitched into the deep waters of Levys wry, accomplished novel.Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review

Things I Dont Want to Know: On Writing

A luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss.

A profound and vivid little volume that is less about the craft than the necessity of making literature.Los Angeles Times Page-Turner blog

The Unloved: A Novel

A group of hedonistic international tourists gathers to celebrate the holidays in a remote French chateau. When a woman is brutally murdered, the subsequent inquiry into the death proves to be more of an investigation into the nature of identity, love, insatiable rage, and sadistic desire.

Graphic, claustrophobic and fractured, this is emotionally violent and challenging work from a bold modern writer. Kirkus Reviews

Impressively ambitious... Unusual and memorable. Times Literary Supplement

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Hot Milk

Sofia, a young anthropologist, has been trying to solve the mystery of her mothers unexplainable illness for years. She is frustrated with Rose and her constant complaints, but utterly relieved to be called to abandon her own disappointing fledgling adult life. She and her mother travel to the searing, arid coast of Spain to see a famous consultanttheir very last chancein the hope that he might cure Roses unpredictable limb paralysis.

But Dr. Gomez has strange methods that seem to have little to do with physical medicine, and as the treatment progresses, Roses illness becomes increasingly baffling. The bond between mother and daughter is pushed to the breaking point and Sofia seeks distraction, becoming entangled in a seductive, mercurial game.

Hot Milk is a labyrinth of desires, impulses, and surreally persuasive logic. Levy explores the sting of sexuality, unspoken female rage, the lure of hypochondria and big pharma, and the strange nature of motherhood, while celebrating the value of experimenting with life: of being curious, bewildered, and vitally alive to the world.

A powerful novel of the interior life, which Levy creates with a vividness that recalls Virginia Woolf... Like a medusa, this novel has a transfixing gaze and a terrible sting that burns long after the final page is turned.Erica Wagner, The Guardian

Exquisite prose... Hot Milk is perfectly crafted, a dream-narrative so mesmerising that reading it is to be under a spell.Suzanne Joinson, The Independent

www.bloomsbury.com

Contents

The first time I met Lisa I knew she was going to help me become a very different sort of man. Knowing this felt like a summer holiday. It made me relax and I am quite a tense person. There is something you should know about me. I have a little hump on my back, a mound between my shoulder blades. You will notice when I wear a shirt without a jacket that there is more to me than first meets the eye. Its strange how fascinating human beings find both celebrity and deformity in their own species. People sink their eyes into my hump for six seconds longer than protocol should allow, and try to work out the difference between themselves and me. The boys called me Ali at school because thats what they thought camels were called. Ali Ali Ali. Alis got the hump. The word playground does not really provide an accurate sense of the sort of ethnic cleansing that went on behind the gates that were supposed to keep us safe. I was instructed in the art of Not Belonging from a very tender age. Deformed. Different. Strange. Go Ho-me Ali, Go Ho-me. In fact I was born in Southend-on-Sea, and so were those boys, but I was exiled to the Arabian Desert and not allowed to smoke with them behind the cockle sheds.

There is something else you ought to know about me. I write copy for a leading advertising agency. I earn a lot of money and my colleagues reluctantly respect me because they suspect Im less content than they are. I have made it my professional business to understand that no one respects ruddy-faced happiness.

I first glimpsed Lisa at the presentation launch for the naming and branding of a new vodka. My agency had won the account for the advertising campaign and I was standing on a small raised stage pointing to a slide of a starry night sky. I adjusted my mic clip and began.

Black Vodka... I said, slightly sinisterly, vodka Noir , will appeal to those in need of stylish angst. As Victor Hugo might have put it, we are alone, bereft, and the night falls upon us; to drink Black Vodka is to be in mourning for our lives.

I explained that vodka was mostly associated with the communist countries of the former Eastern bloc, where it was well known that the exploration of abstract, subjective and conceptual ideas in these regimes was the ultimate defiance of the individual against the state. Black Vodka would hitch a nostalgic ride on all of this and be sold as the edgy choice for the cultured and discerning.

My colleagues sipped their lattes (the intern had done a Starbucks run) and listened carefully to my angle. When I insisted that Vodka Noir had high cheekbones, a few of the guys laughed uneasily. I am known in the office as the Crippled Poet. Then I noticed someone sitting in the audience, a woman with long brown hair (very blond at the ends) who was not from the agency. She had her arms folded across her grey cashmere sweater; an open notebook lay on her lap. Now and again shed pick it up and doodle with her pencil. My sharp eyes (long sight) confirmed that this stranger in our small community was observing me rather clinically.

After the presentation, my colleague Richard introduced me to the woman with the notebook. Although he did not say so, I assumed she was his new girlfriend. Richard is known for splashing his footballers body with a heady cologne every morning. West Indian Limes. Its effect on me is both arousing and desperately melancholy. I could buy five bottles of that seductive cologne tomorrow, yet to draw attention to my damaged body in this way would be to underline its difference from Richards. Anyway, it was quite a shock to see him with the woman whose clinical gaze had for some mysterious reason awoken in me the kind of nihilistic lust I was attempting to whip up in my Vodka Noir campaign.

Richard smiled affectionately at me, apparently amused at something he couldnt be bothered to explain.