Deborah Levy: The Early Novels

by Levy, Deborah

ISBN: 9781632869081

Published: 2017-05-09

Beautiful Mutants, Deborah Levy's feverish allegory of a first novel, introduces a manipulative and magical Russian exile who summons forth a series of grotesques--among them the Poet, the Banker, and the Anorexic Anarchist. Levy explores the anxieties that pervaded the 1980s: exile and emigration, broken dreams, crazed greed and the first seeds of the global financial crisis, self-destructive desires, and the disintegration of culture. In Swallowing Geography, J. K., like her namesake Jack Kerouac, is always on the road, traveling Europe with her typewriter in a pillowcase. She wanders, meeting friends and strangers, battling her raging mother, and taking in the world through her uniquely irreverent, ironic perspective. Levy blends fairytale with biting satire, pushing at the edges of reality and marveling at where the world collapses in on itself. In The Unloved, a group of hedonistic tourists--from Algeria, England, Poland, Germany, Italy, France, and America--gathers to...