Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

Posted on: December 11, 2012

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

Previously published in The Herald magazine. 

Deborah Levy’s latest novel was rejected by many mainstream publishers for being ‘too literary too prosper in a tough economy’ but once it was out there, it did more than just receive positive reviews - it ended up on the Booker Prize shortlist for 2012. Swimming Home is an odd, disturbing little novel, incredibly readable and accessible regardless of its highbrow nature. Levy uses two familiar tropes to set up her strange little story of depression, trauma and uncertainties - a group of people go on holiday and a stranger arrives - and Levy’s stranger really is very strange indeed. 

Two couples and the daughter of one are sharing a villa for the summer near Nice. The beautiful, mad Kitty Finch arrives and is inexplicably offered a room to stay in by Isabel, whose husband Jozef is a reknown poet  - one Kitty is obsessed by. Levy’s opening passages, in which Kitty is found submerged in the villa’s pool by the other guests are some of the book’s finest - the atmosphere she create’s is immediately taut, dangerous and volatile, all on account of the half-feral Kitty, who is often found naked, lurking in silent rooms, acting and talking unpredictably, even threatening the elderly neighbour, Madeline, for reasons revealed later. One character notes that Kitty ‘was a window waiting to be climbed through. A window she guessed was a little broken anyway’, and thirteen year old Nina, herself on the verge of awakening feels that ‘standing next to Kitty Finch was like being near a cork that had just popped out of a bottle. The first pop when gasses seem to escape and everything is sprinkled for one second with something intoxicating.’ 

Kitty is a botanist with ambitions of being a poet. She suffers from depression but admits to  not taking her medication. Her interest lies entirely in Josef, himself a troubled man with a complicated, dark past. Kitty tells him, ‘‘that is why I am here, Jozef, I have come to France to save you from your thoughts’ but insists he read a poem she has written that is a ‘conversation with him’. Josef’s wife, child and friends all seem to be far too aware of what this situation could lead to, with Nina’s knowledge of her fathers affairs ‘not so much an unspoken secret pact between them, more like having a tiny splinter of glass  in the sole of her foot, always there, slightly painful, but [something] she could live with’. 

Kitty’s poem does not help Jozef. He finds that it ‘was mostly made up of etcs; he had counted second of them in one half of the page alone. What kind of language was this?’ Kitty and her ‘small, hot, chaotic world, full of books and fruit and flowers’ is overwhelming - both for Jozef and the others, and for the reader as well. Swimming Home is full of draining emotions, heavy silences that speak volumes thanks to Levy’s controlled eloquent use of spaces, secrets and mood. It’s surprising to find such a richly satisfying story about madness and despair, creativity and desire in under 200 pages.