The Position of Spoons

May 1, 2024

Three-time Booker Prize nominee Levy (August Blue) offers a collection of observations, ranging from the beauty of lemons on a table to the conclusion of a marriage, while also ruminating on literature and art, such as the French author Colette and Leonardo's Mona Lisa. Prepub Alert.

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August 1, 2024
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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Starred review from August 5, 2024
Novelist and playwright Levy (August Blue) delivers a dazzling collection of musings on art, aging, psychoanalysis, celebrity car crashes, and more. The stylish essays—some as brief as one page—run the gamut from funny reflections on the Mona Lisa (“Her hair looks uncared for under her hood. She probably has lice”) and oral sex (“a super sport that should be included in the Olympic games”) to weightier considerations of the human tendency to look away from discomfort. Of model and photographer Lee Miller, whose career took her from fashion runways to documenting the liberation of Buchenwald, Levy writes, “she both hides from and gives herself to the camera.” Taken together, Levy’s extraordinary observations (eggs are “sculptures” that “have the added uncanny allure of being an artwork that is made inside the body of a hen”) amount to a trip through a consciousness trained to deeply consider everything it encounters—be it a pair of shoes, a bowl of lemons, or the work of Simone de Beauvoir. “There is the story and then there is everything else,” Levy posits. Here, she gives space to everything else, with sublime results. Readers will be grateful for this generous peek inside a singular mind. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency.

September 1, 2024
Highly revered among the literati, polymath author Levy (The Man Who Saw Everything, 2019) is known for her plays, novels, and memoirs. The latter, including The Cost of Living (2018), provided glimpses of a more reflective side of the writer, and this collection of 34 essays (some previously published) consists of short, impressionistic vignettes in which Levy contemplates a variety of topics. Some entries appear in a free association cascade featuring witty wordplay, while others are more conventional reviews and commentary. A throughline is the theme of modern arbiters of feminism and the challenge they face in attaining recognition without the added gender qualifier. Levy seeks to elevate those who helped pioneer significant movements under the heavy shadow of their male counterparts. Other entries examine the enduring inheritance of trauma, philosophical interpretations of culture, and the subconscious as a source of artistic inspiration. Many are rich with theory and scholarly references, which may limit the collection's appeal beyond the literary sphere. Followers of French Existentialism and Levy's unique wit and wisdom will be delighted.

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