Swimming Home: Shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize

This book is your summer vacation's worst nightmare. A poet arrives with his family (the enigmatic wife Isabel and 14 yo daughter with mommy issues) at a villa in Nice and sees Kitty Finch,a botanist in their swimming pool who makes her way into their lives, walking naked out of the water, no questions asked.Levy drops metaphors so effortlessly like the bop electronic music from back in 2012 dropping a sick beat.Swimming Home is dreamlike. Her characters are so well carved out. Her narrative is sensational and filled with rich imagery. You can feel the characters taking steps on the dirty grass or diving into the pool because of its cinematic appeal. It's like you're with them at the villa watching these people rip each other apart. With layers of complexity and subtext in each of her sentence, Levy centers her book around depression (talking about rain and pools). She can even make a pebble a frontrunner in a story. I was already sold at the second page with this statement.."Life is only worth living because we hope it'll get better and we'll all get home safely." .Yet, this book wouldn't be for everyone. It's ambiguous and multi-perpective. You're figuring out details and connecting the dots. While reading the last sentence i found myself scribbling the lines from a famous song in the margin which went.. Let the rain wash away all the pain of yesterday. .Levy deserves all the hype.

‘Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely.’I am a huge fan of Deborah Levy’s memoirs, and would quote the entire books if I could, so when I recognised this sentence in Swimming Home that was also quoted in The Cost of Living, I felt excited and welcomed into my first fiction novel written by her. It turned out to be the most disappointing book of the year for me. Published in 2011 and nominated for the Booker, the novel seemed strangely dated. Even if I ignore the minor irritants such as out of context references to a Hindu tailor and one of the main female characters being naked in half the scenes that she’s in without any (convincing) reason (never mind that the “female gaze” of the author was on her anorexic ribs poking out), there was very little that worked for me.I’m sad.

Es un libro interesante.

Personagens mal desenvolvidos, situações mal explicadas, um personagem psicopata adolescente e um intelectual poeta de meia idade que se envolve com a mesma e ao final aparece morto pela autora sem maiores explicações. Dois casais um abonado o poeta e sua mulher jornalista fotógrafa que tem $ e outro casal disfuncional a beira da falência mas que alugam a mesma propriedade de luxo no sul da França.Achei péssimo tanto o plot como o desenvolvimento do texto.

I bought Swimming Home after reading Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living, which I loved. I read Swimming Home in 2 days, I loved the atmosphere of it, the awkward characters and the story. Even though it is tragic at times, the way it is written makes it light and funny. I will definitely read other novels by Levy, as well as the last part of her living autobiography, Real Estate. Brilliant author.

Una maravillas. Un libro exquisito. Una escriptora con una mirada diferente.

Disjointed and I had no feelings for the characters. The ending was difficult to understand. Who died? Did anyone die?