Disjointed read shows themes of single parenting and confused sexualities
“My love for my mother is like an axe,” Sofia says, “It cuts very deep.”
HOT MILK Deborah Levy Loot.co.za (R330) Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Random House)
REVIEWER: SUE TOWNSEND
LEVY’S last novel, Swimming Home, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2012, despite having been rejected for being “too literary” for the marketplace. Hot Milk is being published by Penguin Random House so it would seem that the accolade of a Booker shortlisting has removed the presumed literary stain from this novel, even though it shares themes and obsessions with its predecessor. There is a rather bleak sundried, Mediterranean setting – in Spain; explorations of deeply conflicted family relationships, confusion on the narrator’s part of her sexuality, and so on and so on. “My love for my mother is like an axe,” Sofia says, more than once. “It cuts very deep.” Our narrator is Sofia Irena Papastergiadis born to a Greek father, Christos, who has abandoned his familial duties, and Rose, who is, of course, an English rose, and a Yorkshire one to boot.
Growing up in a one parent family with Rose becoming increasingly troubled and demanding of her clever but easily manipulated daughter,
Sofia finds herself in complete thrall to her mother’s bizarre set of “medical” conditions which culminate in her mortgaging her home to travel, with Sofia in tow, to a questionable “medical” practitioner in Spain.
Here they are holed up in a rented holiday house in a small seaside village.
Sofia, when trying to escape from her mother’s demented demands, swims in the sea, gets stung by a jellyfish (referred to as medusa, not without intent).
She is then treated by the young man in the “injury hut” who is there to treat the medusa stings during the summer months.
They eventually fall into bed together. Another chance meeting is with Ingrid Bauer (the least believable of a number of fairly unbelievable characters); a German who is mending “piles of clothes from the vintage shop…transform [ing] with her needle.
“It was the same in Berlin, and now she had a contact in China who was sending her clothes to redesign.” Not surprisingly, Ingrid, the blonde, strapping fraulein is soon seducing our Sofia who is a small, dark, curly haired confused soul.
Rose’s ailments continue to metamorphose through the visits to Dr Gomez who runs his treatment centre in a white marble dome in the Spanish countryside, aided and abetted by his daughter Julieta, otherwise referred to by her father as Sister Sunshine.
She (Rose) is now wheelchair bound as her legs no longer work and she wishes to have them amputated – Sofia, the relentlessly abused daughter, finds herself limping in sympathy.
Along the way, Sofia runs away to Athens to meet her estranged father and his new wife and baby daughter but no help is clearly going to come from this quarter.
Back in Spain, Sofia finally snaps and drives her mother to the middle of nowhere and pushes her wheelchair into the middle of the road and leaves her there in the face of an on-coming truck.
To disclose more would spoil what is a very strange, disjointed read.