How do we remake ourselves after unravelling? Plunge into life and pay attention, suggests Deborah Levy's mesmerising new work

• In this book, as compact and artfully worked as a sonnet, all these questions are answered.
• Or, more accurately – because Levy prefers questions to answers – they are played with, teased out, turned over.
• Review: August Blue – Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton)

Reality remade

• The world is a now-familiar present, with surgical masks, cancellations, lost jobs, parents working from home and intruding on their children’s lives.
• Life is slowly opening up in the aftermath of the pandemic; it seems as protean and up for grabs as the protagonist herself.
• I had once heard him say to a journalist, No, Elsa M. Anderson is not in a trance when she plays, she is in flight.
• It’s this whole professional self, with its enigmatic M-full-stop, and the soaring persona it denotes, that is up for grabs in August Blue.
• Reality is slowly being remade and Elsa, too, is being remade after apparently losing her nerve on stage just before a performance of her signature piece, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.

‘Upwards and outwards’

• “Upward” is a word and movement – a direction – that gathers psychological and symbolic meaning through the novel.
• Elsa is haunted by the past, including the men who have shaped her, Goldstein and Rachmaninoff.
• But there’s also something beyond them, more distant and yet more present, that’s haunting her, or erupting within her.
• August Blue is as condensed and multifaceted as a diamond – and like a diamond, it’s the embodiment of metamorphosis.

A high horse of her own

• In Real Estate, Levy’s narrator-self wonders why she is
  still searching for a missing female character.
• If I could not find her in real life, why not invent her on the page?
• There she is, steering her high horse with flair, making sure she does not run over girls and women struggling to find a horse of their own.
• If I could not find her in real life, why not invent her on the page?
• There she is, steering her high horse with flair, making sure she does not run over girls and women struggling to find a horse of their own.
• I read it like a thriller, often feeling the urge to weigh its slender size against the great magnitude of its reach.