‘I said yes to everything’

Deborah Levy’s latest on-the-hoof memoir is a masterclass in the art of living

REAL ESTATE by Deborah Levy 304pp, Hamish Hamilton, T £9.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £10.99, ebook £7.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

Real Estate is the third part of the project the novelist Deborah Levy calls her “living autobiography”, in which she has freed herself from convention and found a more organic form. Traditional linear autobiography often comes at the end of a life, freighted with an expectation that hindsight has imbued it with wisdom. Levy’s living autobiography, on the other hand, has engaging immediacy, and we are thrust right into the midst of her sturm und drang.

She collages time frames and subjective memories together with philosophic musings. We live her pains and her pleasures, and to do so is a wonder, as Levy’s writing can turn any experience if not always into gold, then at least turmericcoloured silk – like the bed sheet she takes with her to a literary festival in Mumbai, and has a tailor fashion into a dress.

As in her previous two volumes, Things I Don’t Want to Know and

The Cost of Living, she is still on the quest of understanding her own moods through her writing. But although she may be a little blue as she turns from 59 to 60 in Real Estate, and her younger daughter is about to leave home, her zest reasserts itself.

Her 60th birthday celebration sees her partying in cool Parisian nightclub Silencio, then cooling off at 4am on the banks of the Seine, where she says she’s tempted to dive in. I believe her. She’s a swimmer. She exploits the vicissitudes that are the stuff of life. If life gives her oranges, she makes a jug of freshly squeezed juice; if her shower breaks in Paris, she’s off to find a hammam and bathe with soap made from black olives.

A colleague in Paris asks her: “Did I know the best lemons were from Menton?” She admires his discernment. “Of all the arts, the art of living is probably the most important, something at which he was especially skilled.” She is equally deserving of the compliment, a resourceful woman who is herself an expert in the art of living. Her writing is joyful.

We know from the previous volumes that her marriage has been shipwrecked and that she has refused to swim back to it. She has described that as the ghost that will always haunt her life, and has lived through times where grief had her crying on station escalators. Things I Don’t Want to Know opens with: “That spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot…” She took us back to her childhood in South Africa where she saw police arrest her anti-apartheid father. He became a political prisoner; she was virtually mute for a year. Early in The Cost of Living she writes as if she is still in the headwinds of the storm, but finding herself: “Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want.”

Real Estate opens with Levy shopping in Shoreditch, buying a banana tree, which she feels is waiting to “stretch out into the world”. Her writing world is also unfurling, taking her, in the course of this book, to Mumbai, to Paris, to Berlin and to Hydra. Her imagination will take her to plenty of other places. Most aptly, she is awarded a fellowship by Columbia University to the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. As one empty nest closes, an apartment door in Montparnasse opens.

Places, names and arresting ideas tumble out. She writes of New Mexico, of visiting the home of artist Georgia O’Keefe and staying in a hotel with a fireplace shaped like an ostrich egg. “Yes, I loved this burning egg.” Levy’s curiosity and passion make everything an adventure, and often it’s a culinary adventure. In Mumbai, she smokes bidis and samples bhel puri. “I said yes to everything: yes to tamarind chutney, yes to chopped onion…”

Her discursive style is reminiscent of Paul Klee’s “taking a line for a walk”. She takes a thought then stretches it to see where it will go. She runs with ideas, and riffs on them. Lyrical sentences come naturally, full of cadence. In Mumbai, “a multitude of mirrored sunglasses were laid out, glinting like silver sardines”.

She is on the hunt for real estate, or unreal estate, playing with fantasy versions of what she would like to possess. Soon her younger daughter will leave for university, and she will be living alone. Her daughters joke that her banana tree is her third child, so she will still have it to nurture. She has had the courage to unmake her married life, and now she “will be required to make another life all over again”. She owns a north London flat with crumbling corridors, but now she has an eye out for some gracious property, perhaps a villa with a pomegranate tree and the scent of mimosas, with a river or the sea at the bottom of the garden – swimming is a necessity – and a rowing boat.

She has only ever relied on herself to put the baguettes on the table. She asks herself in this memoir “what do we value, what might we own, discard and bequeath”. Real Estate is a playful title: for all the fantasy villas she desires, she comes to realise her books are her real estate. She will bequeath their royalties to her daughters. What she most values are real human relations and imagination.

She’s particularly touching on the love between mothers and daughters, and funny too. She misses her own mother who taught her to swim and to row. When the girls visit her in Paris they talk so animatedly on the Métro that they miss their stop. She tells them they are beautiful. “They both agreed that all mothers think their children are beautiful and gave me an update on the banana tree.”

Levy is great at friendship, too. She robustly teases her best male friend, who says of his third wife: “Nadia scares me s---less, but if I lost her I would be inconsolable.” After a prosecco Campari spritz, her Norwegian friend Agnes performs a yogic headstand and scissor kicks Levy’s real estate dreams to shreds. “‘Get off your high horse Agnes,’ I shouted through a coil of smoke.”

In Hydra, she dives into the embrace of the Aegean. “It washes from me the pain of thwarted hope for enduring love, connects me with my mother who taught me to swim, calms my fears about the future, takes the edge off the turbulence of my broken marriage, helps me reach for ideas yet empties my mind, brings me closer to both life and death.” Real Estate is a book to dive into. Come on in, the water’s lovely.

In Mumbai, she spots ‘mirrored sunglasses laid out, glinting like silver sardines’