Deborah Levy - Swimming Home

14-19-635
Vydáno: 2012
Obsah:

In south-east France in July 1994, Joe and Isabel Jacobs are staying with their 14-year-old daughter Nina and another couple. Joe is a poet, his name anglicised after fleeing occupied Poland in 1942 at the age of five. Isabel is a war reporter. Their friends Mitchell and Laura run a business selling primitive weaponry as souvenirs. None is prepared for the sight of a woman ("Is it a bear?") in their swimming pool one afternoon. She is Kitty Finch, the engine of the book.
Isabel invites Kitty to stay. She and Joe are troubled in their marriage and Kitty is "a window waiting to be climbed through" for both of them. Her tendency to wander around naked makes her body the object of examination. She is doll-like, and has the appearance of a mute, male fantasy, but she is an agent of change, potent as well as vulnerable. Her reason for coming to the villa is her love for Joe's poetry, and, to his dismay, she has brought her own poem, "Swimming Home", for him to read.
Poetry is not all that Kitty and Joe have in common. She has come off Seroxat, and Joe has written about the treatment he received for his own depression: "give me your history and I will give you something to take it away". Joe's history turns out not to be the removable kind, however. Isabel, witnessing "human demolition" in her war reporting, has been shattered by knowledge and experience: her own submission to history. She has attempted to be "a powerful but fragile female character", but has suffered from society's double standards. "To do the things she had chosen to do in the world, she risked forfeiting her place as a wife and mother, a bewildering place haunted by all that had been imagined for her if she chose to sit in it."
What links Kitty, Joe and Isabel is control. Kitty appears anorexic and feels that Isabel is "controlling them all". Isabel's decision to let Kitty stay is an act of dominance which risks spiralling out of control. Joe sees both his poetry and Isabel's reporting as attempts to still the uncontrollable. "Isabel recorded and witnessed catastrophes to try and make people remember. He tried to make himself forget." The book itself seems always to be on the brink of chaos: someone goes missing, plot lines are subverted and it ends with a shock.
The central characters – Kitty, Isabel, Joe and Nina – are perfectly presented. Levy switches between viewpoints and balances attention among them carefully (though the secondary parts are sketchier). The novel is intimate in detail, and fits so much into so little space that it's tempting to check back to make sure the pages are numbered properly.
It also has repeated passages which gradually mesmerise the reader. "Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely," Kitty says more than once. "But you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all." In this novel, home is elusive, safety is unlikely, and the reader closes the book both satisfied and unnerved.

Skóre: 7/10