Coming in May 2023 from Penguin, the latest novel from Booker short-listed author Deborah Levy, is a haunting feast of a story about Elsa, a concert pianist in search of herself. It catches the wave the movie Tar stirred up earlier this year — the idea of a highly talented musician facing her personal demons in the esoteric world of classical music.
Elsa retreats from her successful life when, her long hair dyed a disturbing bright blue, she loses her place in a performance of Rach 2, much to the dismay of her adoptive father and piano teacher, Arthur Goldstein, and the bemusement of her friends. She goes to Greece to teach piano to a gender-querying teenager on the island of Poros, having encountered at the flea market in Athens an assured woman buying two small mechanical horses — which Elsa coveted — and picking up the woman’s black fedora hat abandoned as if as a consolation prize. Elsa thinks the horse-buying, fedora-donating woman is, in some way, her doppelganger — another version of her own self.
There is nothing in this set-up that screams ‘must-read’. Along with the blue hair, it’s almost too odd and esoteric, and I struggled with the contrived feeling of that first encounter in the flea market, though I loved the account of the hair salon appointment.
I liked the juxtaposition of high art with the process of hair-dying, and the insistent presence of intrusive, challenging gay piano teacher, Arthur Goldstein, forced by the exasperated workers in the salon to get his hair washed and dried just to shut him up for a while. Elsa recognises the destructive nature of her impulse to change her appearance so drastically. Her birth and adoptive mothers both assert their presence in Elsa’s subconscious, cringing in horror as the long , eponymous ‘August Blue’ hair rolls down her back.
So it ends up being a kind of mystery story about who Elsa – or Ann – really is, how it was that the piano became such an intrinsic part of her life. How she can negotiate this troubled period in her life, her career all but destroyed by her loss of focus in the course of that fateful performance.
The writing, consciously literary — dialogue seeps through the prose with nothing as declasse as a quotation mark to distract us — and, as ever with Levy’s work, is always compelling, always interests and stimulates.
Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin for the opportunity to read this arty, artful and accomplished novel before publication on 4th May.
Izzy Brown 