REAL ESTATE

DEBORAH LEVY

Hamish Hamilton, 304pp, £10.99

Real Estate is the third slim volume in Deborah Levy’s self-styled ‘living autobiography’ – the first two having dealt with her childhood in South Africa and her beginning as a writer and the second with the break-up of her marriage and the death of her mother. Now she is approaching sixty and speculating about what she wants from the rest of her life. She travels, and muses, and pitches the idea of a woman who follows her own desires to film executives, getting nowhere. She imagines what she wants from her dream home – balconies overlooking the Mediterranean, a pomegranate tree and an egg-shaped fireplace like the one she saw at Georgia O’keeffe’s house in Mexico.

So far so glossy but Susannah

Butter in the Evening Standard noted that Levy was ‘painfully aware that for centuries, women have been real estate, owned by their husbands, not owning their own property’. The dream remains a dream as Levy accepts that what she most values are ‘real humans and imagination. It is possible we cannot have one without the other . . . in this sense, my books are my real estate.’

Catherine Taylor in the FT admired the way Levy’s writing mirrored ‘life’s incautious and uneven trajectories’. Claire Lowdon in the

Sunday Times found the book lacking the urgency of its predecessor,

The Cost of Living, which was ‘essential reading for anyone who has a mother or is one… The deconstruction of the family home, a mother’s death — these are essentially more powerful subjects than literary festivals and writers’ residencies.’