Deborah Levy - Hot Milk

Rating: 3/5

Review:
A bit of a struggle

This is  the first of Deborah Levy's books I have read.  I can see that it is very well written and I can also see that it is exploring important human themes of alienation, identity, the relationship between mother and daughter and so on.  In spite of all that, though, I found it hard going in the end.

The whole book has a dreamlike, almost hallucinatory quality about it.  It is narrated in the first person by Sophie, who has taken her mother to a clinic in Almeria to try to cure her mysterious illnesses.  Sophie is an intelligent, thoughtful observer who has degrees in anthropology, but whose stultifying relationship with her mother (among other things) means that she has never put these skills to full use.  Rather as we did in Tom McCarthy's Satin Island, we have a detached, almost alienated anthropologist as narrator and, like her, we're often unsure of what is really going on. 

It was well enough done to keep me rather gripped by the atmosphere for about half its length, but I'm afraid after that I really began to get a bit fed up.  It's better than Satin Island (which I thoroughly disliked), but does suffer from some similar problems for me.  I don't insist on likeable characters or a strong plot and I'm happy to wrestle with a difficult narrative and to be left guessing at things.  However, at some point, I do need a little something to hold onto, and being left grasping at symbols, elusive ideas and atmosphere almost throughout, I really felt pretty lost.  It certainly has a powerfully haunting, stifling feel about it, and Sophie (and her mother) are convincing and memorable characters, but as a novel…hmm.

I suspect that quite a few people will like this more than I do, and I wouldn't be surprised to see this on the shortlists of some major awards this year (particularly after Satin Island made the 2015 Booker shortlist) because it is so well written.  It does have undoubted merits, but I can't honestly recommend it as a rewarding book.

(I received a free ARC via Netgalley.)