Swimming Home: A Novel

I enjoyed this book, but I found it very unsettling. Not since Confederacy of Dunces have I read a book in which the characters so frustrated me. None of them have any redeeming qualities. And for good reason. What the plot synopses do not tell you is this is a book about mental illness. If you have ever lived with or cared about someone with a mental illness, the book is likely to strike close to home (a sign of well-drawn characters and believable plot). Levy's prose is beautifully written. She's a writer to watch and I imagine her work will make it into college lit and writing classes very soon, if it hasn't already.

The first thing one reads in this book is an incredibly pretentious introduction with references to Sylvia Plath, Kafka, Robbe-Grillet, the "emotional and cerebral choreographies of Pina Bausch" (of course!), Marcel Duchamp, Freud and others. I wasn't sure whether it was supposed to be serious or parody. And then we get to the book itself, which seems to shimmer in a threatening sunlit world in the south of France where insects and critters are on the verge of taking over a lovely villa with its attendant swimming pool.The book begins with a naked body floating in the pool and will end with another body in the same pool. The first body belongs to Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails. The villa has been rented to two couples from England -- Joe Jacobs is a poet and Holocaust survivor; his wife Isobel is a war correspondent absent much of the time. Their daughter, Nina, a nymph of 14, on the cusp of womanhood, becomes the central fulcrum of the story. The other couple are Mitchell and :Laura, bankrupt owners of a shop selling African artifacts in London.Kitty, we learn, has a history of depression and violent behavior. She has written a poem she wishes to show to Joe, who himself has battled the psychic scars of a childhood spent surviving the Nazis. Isabel and Joe's marriage is barely holding together. Kitty's arrival has unhinged whatever delicate balance there was in their lives. She brings a desperate, unpredictability to the scene. Joe knows he should not read her poem, which will be prelude to sex. And sex will be a pleasure, a pain, a shock, an experiment but most of all a mistake. It will bring him face to face with feelings and thought he would rather stay buried. It will make it impossible for him ever to get back home -- and life, as Kitty says, is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely."This book, poetic and enigmatic as it is, always seems to be hinting at truths buries beneath the surface. It's thought-provoking and a little disturbing. While I admired the writing and the thinking that went into it, I never really identified with the characters and so didn't care that much what happened to them.

Joe and Isabel Jacobs and their young teenage daughter Nina are on holidays in a villa just outside Nice in the south of France. Family friends Mitchell and Laura are staying with them. Joe is a famous and successful poet, and Isabel a war correspondent who has spent long periods away from home. Nina is closer to Joe as a result. Mitchell and Laura run a shop selling exotic guns and poor world artefacts to Londoners with more money than sense. As the novel opens, these characters come upon something floating in the villa's pool. It's a woman, Kitty Finch, naked and primal, and also we quickly realise, off her tree.Kitty is no stranger to the villa and fabricates an excuse for her presence. In reality she has written a poem, called Swimming Home, which is intended for Joe and which she is keen to discuss with him. Joe is a philanderer and Isabel asks Kitty to stay with them, hoping that this will provoke a situation where Isabel can make a clean break from Joe.The villa's caretaker Jurgen is infatuated with Kitty and has known her for some time. A retired doctor next door, Madeleine Sheridan, also knows Kitty and was instrumental in getting her admitted to a psychiatric hospital after their previous encounter.As the story unfolds, we learn some things from Joe's past that hang like a cloud over his life, things that Kitty also knows and which are incorporated into her poem. Nina, despite her youth, seems to be the only one who is clear about Kitty's intentions but no one is listening to her. Mitchell and Laura feel threatened by Kitty, but there is never much clarity about their perceptions. From her balcony next door, Madeleine looks down on the drama as it unfolds but is helpless to intervene. The others are too driven by their own desires and old demons to take any sensible advice. As in a Greek tragedy, fate must take its course.Kitty develops a closeness with both Nina and Joe, but all the time with a view to getting Joe to accept her poem and its special meaning for him. Events come to a dramatic climax and the lives of the key characters will be knocked for six. In the final chapter set seventeen years later, Nina reflects on events at the villa and the seeming inevitability of people's fates. She would love to shield her young daughter from what life has in store, but she knows that is a pipe dream.Deborah Levy writes well. There are some excellent descriptive passages and the plot moves along at a good rate. There are sufficient complexities and twists to keep the reader's attention. The fatal fault is the poor development of the characters. None of them is particularly likeable - though that is no bar to a convincing story - but none of them is particularly plausible either.Joe's history is never explored in sufficient detail to make his motives and actions understandable. Isabel's desire to leave him has no origin that can be discerned from what we know about her. Nina is more a Greek chorus than a fully-fledged person, with Madeleine playing one of the gods looking down on the follies of mankind. Kitty is the most fully depicted character but her motivations are opaque and her madness is not a sufficient excuse for that. Mad people sometimes have lucid insights into the state of the world, but how and why has Kitty acquired her knowledge of Joe and his desires?Characters appear and disappear in a very contrived way. Whenever Kitty goes over the top, Jurgen the stereotypical German hippy is suddenly there to calm her down and take her off. We never understand why Mitchell and Laura are close to the Jacobs family, nor what motivates them. Laura is close to Isabel, but Mitchell does not seem to get on with anyone. Why would you invite such people on holidays with you? They are the types you travel to get away from. Mitchell has a breakdown towards the end of the novel, but nothing has prepared us to accept that he is capable of such emotional depth.Modern novels tend to be short, perhaps in line with diminished attention spans and competition from other distractions. In this case Levy's story would have benefited from being longer in order to flesh out the players in more detail and make them more convincing. She certainly has the skills to do this. Maybe next time.

From the very beginning it is predictable that someone will die (or something will be destroyed) sooner or later, and indeed it is so. The plot and the setting is o.k., however the details and the actions/reactions of the main characters are rather incomprehensible to me. In the end I still can not understand many clues/threads, for examples, (1) Why Isabel lets Kitty stay? (2) Why Joe cries suddenly? (3) What are the final words of Joe to Nina? (4) Why the story ( or existence) of Laura and Mitchell? (5) What does the ET refer to? (6) What is the "botanist" setting for? How can Kitty be a botanist! and Why a botanist? and the crucial (7) Is Kitty mad or not? All of these are not answered in this 160-page thin novel, and I am not satisfied.

Es un libro interesante.

Personagens mal desenvolvidos, situações mal explicadas, um personagem psicopata adolescente e um intelectual poeta de meia idade que se envolve com a mesma e ao final aparece morto pela autora sem maiores explicações. Dois casais um abonado o poeta e sua mulher jornalista fotógrafa que tem $ e outro casal disfuncional a beira da falência mas que alugam a mesma propriedade de luxo no sul da França.Achei péssimo tanto o plot como o desenvolvimento do texto.

I bought Swimming Home after reading Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living, which I loved. I read Swimming Home in 2 days, I loved the atmosphere of it, the awkward characters and the story. Even though it is tragic at times, the way it is written makes it light and funny. I will definitely read other novels by Levy, as well as the last part of her living autobiography, Real Estate. Brilliant author.

Great book. Great writer.

Una maravillas. Un libro exquisito. Una escriptora con una mirada diferente.