![]() ![]() ![]() Levy’s deceivingly slim books are crammed with allusions to her literary progenitors: Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, but also Louise Bourgeois, Claude Cahun, and Cindy Sherman. Levy has described her fascination with those pearls as stemming from Colette’s novel Cheri, which begins with a couple’s quarrel over a pearl necklace that the man believes would look better on him than on his lover. “Tuesday is not your day, is it?” Her unhappiness, Levy writes, was like Beckett’s definition of sorrow: “A thing you can keep adding to all your life…like a stamp or an egg collection.” At that moment, the pearl necklace that Levy wears all the time-even to write in a dusty shed, even to go swimming-breaks, and the pearls scatter to the ground. She sells her family house, moves with her daughters to an apartment building whose “communal corridors were covered in grey industrial plastic for three years after we moved in,” and subjects herself entirely to “the Republic of Writing and Children.” One day, lugging heavy grocery bags, Levy runs into a neighbor who has taken to scolding her for leaving her bicycle in the wrong parking lot. At around the age of fifty, just as “life was supposed to be slowing down” for Levy, a South Africa–born writer based in England, her marriage falls apart. ![]() If you’ve read Deborah Levy’s punchy memoir The Cost of Living (2018), you know about her string of pearls. ‘Fading Memory,’ 2014 collage by Johanna Goodman ![]()
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