[Levy’s] writing is one radiant mise-en-scène after another . . . Dreamy but diamond-sharp, prismatic, droll . . . Each sentence precisely pins down a feeling, and with such economy . . . Her words are lit from within.”
—Grace Linden, Los Angeles Review of Books
“A collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.”
—John H. Maher, The Millions
“The sharp brilliant novelist Deborah Levy returns . . . She’s able to relish minute details of the world in her signature style, with imagination and insight that makes her one of the best and most original writers of today.”
—Sam Franzini, Our Culture
“Her thoughts on varied people and topics have no link other than the observant mind of Levy herself. But taken together, her comment on the beauty of lemons or the end of a marriage or the pleasures of a city park form a portrait of the author herself as surely as any biography.”
—Michael Giltz, Parade
“The Position of Spoons, by ultra-prolific Deborah Levy, plays like a lunch with an especially sharp, scattered pal, with brief (often one or two pages total) thoughts on celebrity death, Collette, female friendships, lemons…”
—Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune
“A dazzling collection of musings on art, aging, psychoanalysis, celebrity car crashes, and more . . . Taken together, Levy’s extraordinary observations . . . amount to a trip through a consciousness trained to deeply consider everything it encounters . . . Readers will be grateful for this generous peek inside a singular mind.”
—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
“Levy shares illuminating glimpses into her writing life and engages readers on topics as varied as French writers, automobiles, and wisteria plants . . . A marvelous montage of essays and vignettes exploring the emotional and intellectual contours of her interior world.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Many of these disparate texts were originally published as commissioned introductions to novels or articles in journals, but together they acquire an electric energy as they begin to take the shape of an untethered, free-form autobiography . . . An elegant, minimalist collage.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Writing with lyricism and wit always, Levy takes the reader on a journey through all that has mattered most to her writing and living, the things that make up her heart and mind’s tender fixations, and offers a way for us all to meditate on the small and crucial ways we make sense of the world.”
—Julia Hass, Lit Hub
2024-06-28
Short essays collectively providing insights into a writer’s practice and her life as a reader.
“It’s always a pleasure,” writes three-time Booker Prize nominee Levy, “when the balance between enigma and coherence is in the right place.” Many of these disparate texts were originally published as commissioned introductions to novels or articles in journals, but together they acquire an electric energy as they begin to take the shape of an untethered, free-form autobiography. Levy writes of her teenage admiration of Colette and her first encounter with Marguerite Duras. She pens two discrete celebrations of Violette Leduc and a rhapsodic short tribute on Hope Mirrlees, whoseParis: A Poem was first published by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. She declares that the essays of Elizabeth Hardwick are “of value to anyone interested in the ways in which women are made present in literature.” And while her focus lies predominantly on under-celebrated 20th-century female artists and writers, she repeatedly strives to find something bigger than simple feminist appreciation. “It is so important,” she writes while discussing photographer Francesca Woodman, “to have a grip when we walk out of the frame of femininity into something vaguer, something more blurred.” A few texts are underdeveloped and feel as if they were limited by an arbitrary word count; others, like “The Mortality Project” and a long introduction to J.G. Ballard's novelKingdom Come, feel like thematic outliers. Despite a few flat notes, it becomes apparent that these parts work in concert to create the vague blurriness she alludes to in her Woodman tribute. In the poem for Swiss surrealist Meret Oppenheim that gives the collection its title, she writes, “It is hard to find a form for freedom / Deep, light, unstable, ageless / Shifting, raw, slippery, lonely // But we do / We do find it.”The Position of Spoons points the way.
An elegant, minimalist collage.
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