It began with Arundahti Roy's novel that moved me to tears, lots of them. Her book, "The God of Small Things" was assigned to me in a class and when I, being so moved, went to my professor's office hours to commune with a kindred spirit, she casually mentioned that it had won the Man Booker literary prize and that I ought to peruse other such winners. On this advice I found my way not just to a few of the other winners, but to many of the books that had made the short list of finalist. This is a habit I have continued and rarely have I been let down.
Deborah Levy's "Swimming Home" was a 2012 Man Booker short list finalist that like many such others before it, was oh-so-satisfying. Now "Swimming Home" is not satisfying in that warm cup of tea on a cold night sort of way. Instead, it is most decidedly a cerebral shiver of secret joy for it is dark, deranged, erotic as well as strangely funny and nearly impossible to put down.
The tale takes place in a weeks time in France. Two couples that don't seem to particularly like each other have rented a villa for the summer. One couple's lives are spiraling into disaster due to the bancruptcy of their London antique gun and jewelry shop while the other couple's marriage is a facade held together by a thread. This second couple and their 14-year-old daughter are the main players in the story. They anyways, and the mentally unstable, naked nymph they all find floating in the pool when they arrive. Strangely, Isabel the wife, who is a famous television war correspondent, invites Kitty Finch the nymph, to stay. This invitation serves as the mechanism that turns the wheels of Levy's book as Kitty is in fact a mentally ill stalker of Isabel's husband Joe, or J.H.J, or Jozef, a famous philandering poet with deep troubles of his own.
All of the characters and indeed the whole of the story Levy creates is pulled together bit by bit in brief snatches of scenes that are at once rich and lean, expressive of the whole while never quite giving it to us until the end when she triumphantly and beautifully shocks us. Levy is a surgically precise master packing her sentences with layer upon layer of meaning yet also manipulating us through nuance and language. This skill, along with a story that shrewdly twists a standard plot makes "Swimming Home" a true treat.
