Blessed are the poetic stylists of the world. One of those revered novelists that I can let slip by, Deborah Levy came to my particular notice with her 2019 novel, The Man Who Saw Everything, and her 2021 memoir, Real Estate, but I read neither. Such a mistake, at least based on her recent brief but fulsome novel, August Blue! Immediately launching into the tale of a prodigious concert pianist who fluffs a concert and then begins seeing a strange woman in European locations as she struggles to construct a new post-concert life, this stylish work invites close-up reading, paragraph by paragraph. Very “literary” in the sense of needing a reader’s concentration, the storyline is brisk and intriguing enough to generate huge existential tension, and I found the closing third, with its exploration of unhealed wounds from childhood, to be both moving and strangely pertinent to my own current life. Call me a fan now that I’ve read August Blue.
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