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  Praise for Deborah Levy

  The Man Who Saw Everything

  “She’s the kind of writer who pauses in the middle of a memoir to suddenly ask, in genuine puzzlement: “What is a woman for? What should a woman be?” Her rich, obsessional body of work is consumed by questions of how scripts—of gender, nationality, identity—paper over how fundamentally, how painfully, unknowable we are to ourselves.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Ms. Levy, with exquisite precision, stitches in a clue here, another there, weaving together past and present … all the while suspending her characters in a preternaturally sharp present.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Her books hover between dream and reality, consciousness and unconsciousness.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “One of the most intellectually exciting writers in Britain today.”

  —The New York Times

  The Cost of Living

  A New York Times Notable Book A New York Public Library Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

  “[Levy] is an indelible writer … [an] elliptical genius … The Cost of Living … is always a pleasure to consume.”

  —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

  “An astute observer of both the mundane and the inexplicable, Levy sketches memorable details in just a few strokes … What makes the book stand out … is that Levy doesn’t allow herself to linger over these details … She’s like an expert rafter, and the river she travels is full of encounters and emotions. While another writer might give us a lengthy tour of this turbulent water, Levy doesn’t slow down. There’s joy in her maneuvering through the rapids, difficult though they may be. And there’s joy for us in watching her.”

  —Yiyun Lee, The New York Times Book Review

  “The Cost of Living is unclassifiable, original, full of unexpected pleasures at every turn. Though it can be read in a flash, I suspect readers will want to savor this book slowly for its many moments of insight, humor, wisdom, and surprise. Delivered in gorgeous, disciplined prose, Deborah Levy has crafted a bracing, searing inquiry into one woman’s life that manages to tell the truth of all women’s lives. I loved it.”

  —Dani Shapiro

  “Levy would never tell another woman to live the way she does, or to live any one way at all. She’s too sophisticated a feminist for that. Still, she wants us … to know that she’s happy, that she’s thriving in this new, uncharted life. Her work is, too. The last sentence of the book starts, ‘The writing you are reading now is made from the cost of living.’ For writing this good, the cost of living is plainly the right price to pay.”

  —NPR.org

  “This is a writer who has found her voice and her subject, and both speak directly to our times … Levy captivates us from her wonderful first sentence … If you want evidence that Levy’s struggles to find a life that makes sense for her have paid off, this book is Exhibit A.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Extraordinary and beautiful. Ranging widely and deeply over marriage, motherhood, love, death and friendship, it is a work suffused with fierce intelligence, generous humanity and razor-sharp insights.”

  —Financial Times

  “Powerful.”

  —Oprah.com

  “Spare, lucid, profound, Levy’s book is an evaluation of the work of a writer and the work of being a woman in the world.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “She’s the most delicious narrator … What makes Levy remarkable, beyond the endless pleasures of her sentences, is her resourcefulness and wit. She’s ingenious, practical, and dryly amused, somehow outside herself enough to find the grim, telling humor in almost any situation. Her experience is interesting to her largely for what it reveals about society, rather than the other way round … This is a manifesto for a risky, radical kind of life, out of your depth but swimming all the same.”

  —New Statesman

  “Levy, nearing the end of her fifties, is writing her life not for her peers but for a new generation. Since we tend to speak of feminism as coming in waves, separated by generation gaps (most recently the supposed rift between millennials and baby boomers), we often focus on what divides women. What if instead we saw all women as trying to understand themselves as major characters in a society that will grant them only the status of minor ones?”

  —Harper’s Magazine

  “A tender, vulnerable book with a fierce strength and intelligence at its core. We sense the courage and honesty Levy required to submerge herself, breath held, fully in the past in order to find her way into a new, altered present.”

  —Nadja Spiegelman

  “Searching for something to read after devouring Women and Power? Known for her piquant novels, Deborah Levy now takes to non-fiction, with a ‘working autobiography’ that comprises thoughtful dissections of life as a woman.”

  —Elle, “Here Are the 21 Books We’re Most Excited to Read in 2018”

  “How thrilling to read this vivid account by a brilliant woman leaving the marital and maternal we for scary freedom in the land of I. I loved this book!”

  —Honor Moore

  “The Cost of Living refers to the price a woman has to pay for unmaking the home she no longer feels at home in. In Levy’s case, this radical act of erasure inaugurates a quest for a new life that is inseparable from the writing of a new narrative.”

  —The Irish Times

  “[Levy] packs astounding insight and clarity into every passage … If I could, I would buy these books for every woman I know.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “Highly evocative and allusive.”

  —Vulture

  Things I Don’t Want to Know

  “A lively, vivid account of how the most innocent details of a writer’s personal story can gain power in fiction.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Profound.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “[Levy] is a skilled wordsmith and creates an array of intense emotions and moods in precise, controlled prose.”

  —Independent

  “A vivid, striking account of a writer’s life.”

  —The Spectator

  “Powerful.

  —New Statesman

  “An up-to-date version of ‘A Room of One’s Own,’ and, like the Virginia Woolf essay, I suspect it will be quoted for many years to come.”

  —Irish Examiner

  “Levy successfully weaves historical, political, and personal threads together to form a nuanced account of her life and why she writes. Her graceful memoir/essay emphasizes a woman’s need to speak out even if she has to use a quiet voice. For feminists and memoir enthusiasts.”

  —Library Journal

  “Rather than, say, telling the reader to show rather than tell, [Levy] declines to tell us anything and then shows us a great deal. What results is much more valuable than any literal writing guide or any literal response to Orwell would have been. It certainly has greater political import.”

  —Biographile

  “Few essayists have the courage and talent to go head-to-head with George Orwell. Deborah Levy’s response to Orwell’s iconic piece ‘Why I Write’ is at once a feminist call to arms, a touching memoir of small moments, and a guide to writing fiction from one of literature’s bravest rulebreakers.”

  —Barnes & Noble Review

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Ophelia and the Great Idea

  Beautiful Mutants

  Swallowing Geography

  The Unloved

  Diary of a Steak

  Billy & Girl

  Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places

  Swi
mming Home

  Black Vodka

  Things I Don’t Want to Know

  Hot Milk

  The Cost of Living

  The Man Who Saw Everything

  CONTENTS

  One: London

  Two

  Three: New York

  Four: London

  Five: Mumbai

  Six: London

  Seven

  Eight: Paris

  Nine

  Ten: Berlin

  Eleven: Paris

  Twelve: The 18th

  Thirteen: London

  Fourteen: Greece

  A Note on the Author

  ONE

  LONDON

  In the winter of January 2018, I bought a small banana tree from a flower stall outside Shoreditch High Street station. It seduced me with its shivering, wide green leaves, also with the new leaves that were furled up, waiting to stretch out into the world. The woman who sold it to me had long fake eyelashes, blue-black and luscious. In my mind’s eye her lashes stretched all the way from the bagel shops and grey cobblestones of East London to the deserts and mountains of New Mexico. The delicate winter blooms at her stall had me thinking about the artist Georgia O’Keeffe and the way she painted flowers. It was as if she were introducing each one of them to us for the first time. In O’Keeffe’s hands they became peculiar, sexual, uncanny. Sometimes her flowers looked as if they had stopped breathing under the scrutiny of her gaze.

  When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.

  Georgia O’Keeffe, quoted in the New York Post, 16 May 1946

  She had found her final house in New Mexico, a place to live and work at her own pace. As she insisted, it was something she had to have. She had spent years restoring this low-slung adobe house in the desert before she finally moved into it. A while back, when I made the journey to Santa Fe, New Mexico, partly to see O’Keeffe’s house, I remember feeling dizzy when I arrived at Albuquerque airport. My driver told me it was because we were 6,000 feet above sea level. The dining room in my hotel, owned by a Native American family, had a tall adobe fireplace built into the wall in the shape of an ostrich egg. I had never seen an oval fireplace before. It was October and it was snowing, so I pulled up a chair in front of the glowing logs and sipped a cup of smoky clear mescal, which was apparently good for above-sea-level sickness. The curved fireplace made me feel welcome and calm. It pulled me into its centre. Yes, I loved this burning egg. That fireplace was something I had to have.

  I was also searching for a house in which I could live and work and make a world at my own pace, but even in my imagination this home was blurred, undefined, not real, or not realistic, or lacked realism. I yearned for a grand old house (I had now added an oval fireplace to its architecture) and a pomegranate tree in the garden. It had fountains and wells, remarkable circular stairways, mosaic floors, traces of the rituals of all who had lived there before me. That is to say the house was lively, it had enjoyed a life. It was a loving house.

  The wish for this home was intense, yet I could not place it geographically, nor did I know how to achieve such a spectacular house with my precarious income. All the same, I added it to my imagined property portfolio, along with a few other imagined minor properties. The house with the pomegranate tree was my major acquisition. In this sense, I owned some unreal estate. The odd thing was that every time I tried to see myself inside this grand old house, I felt sad. It was as if the search for home was the point, and now that I had acquired it and the chase was over, there were no more branches to put in the fire.

  In the meanwhile I had to get my new banana tree home from Shoreditch on a bus and a train to my crumbling apartment block on the hill. It was growing in a pot, about one foot high. The flower seller with long, luscious fake eyelashes told me she reckoned it wanted to live a more humid life. It had been a cold winter in the UK so far and we agreed we were also yearning for a more humid life.

  While I was on the train to Highbury and Islington, I added a few more details to my unreal estate. Despite the egg-shaped fireplace my major house was obviously situated in a hot climate, near a lake or the sea. A life without swimming every day was not a life I wanted. It was hard to admit this to myself, but the ocean and the lake were more important to me than the house. In fact I would be content to live in a humble wooden cabin on the edge of an ocean or a lake, but somehow I looked down on myself for not having a bigger dream.

  It seemed that acquiring a house was not the same thing as acquiring a home. And connected to home was a question I swatted away every time it landed too near me. Who else was living with me in the grand old house with the pomegranate tree? Was I alone with the melancholy fountain for company? No. There was definitely someone else there with me, perhaps even cooling their feet in that fountain. Who was this person?

  A phantom.

  My plan for the banana tree was to add it to the garden I had made on three shelves in my bathroom. I knew from the succulents enjoying their displaced life in North London that it would like the warm steam from the shower. My apartment block had still not been restored, seven years after I moved into it, and the grey communal corridors were in an even worse state of disrepair. Like love, they badly needed restoring. The banana plant didn’t care about the state of the building. If anything, it seemed ecstatic to move in and began to show off, unfurling its wide, veined leaves.

  My daughters became curious about the attention I was bestowing upon this plant. They both agreed that I was obsessed with the banana tree because my youngest daughter was going to be leaving home for university soon. That tree, my youngest (age eighteen) told me, was my third child. Its job was to replace her when she left home. In the months of its growing, she would ask, ‘How is your new child doing?’ and she would point to the tree.

  I would soon be living alone. If I had made another sort of life since I separated from her father, it seemed that soon, age fifty-nine, I would be required to make another life all over again. I did not want to think about this, so I began to pack up a few things to take to my new writing shed.

  TWO

  It was literally an oasis built amongst palms, ferns and tall bamboo. I couldn’t believe my eyes or my luck. The garden surrounding my new writing shed, which was built on decking, resembled a tropical rainforest. Really, I should have gifted my banana tree to this garden, but as my daughters had suggested, it had become part of the family. My shed landlord gave me the key to the garden side entrance so I did not need to interrupt him in the main house. The day I arrived he placed a hyacinth inside the shed. Its perfume was overwhelming and welcoming in equal measure. Perhaps its perfume was even violent. I unpacked three Russian glasses with silver handles for coffee, a cafetière, one jar of coffee (100% Arabica), two tangerines, a bottle of ruby port from Porto (left over from Christmas), two bottles of sparkling water, almond biscuits from Italy, three teaspoons, my laptop and two books. And an adaptor of course, this time a coil with four sockets. My shed landlord, who was born in New Zealand, had planted the garden around my new shed with flair, imagination, maybe even nostalgia. I thought he had created something of New Zealand in London NW8, that is to say, his homeland was haunting this London garden because it still haunted him.

  At a literary festival in Austria, I had met a writer from Romania who arrived in Switzerland as a refugee in 1987. She had rented a room in a Zurich street which she thought resembled her street in Bucharest. And then she had made her Zurich room look similar to her room in Bucharest. She reminded me that when I was twenty-nine, I had written a book of linked stories called Swallowing Geography. Actually, I hadn’t forgotten that I had written a whole book, but I was pleased it felt new to her. She told me that she had pinned to the wall by her bed the words of the female narrator:

  Each new journey is a mourning for what has been left behind. The wanderer sometimes tries to recreate what has been left behind, in a new place.

/>   It seemed that I was now busy making the new writing shed look quite similar to my old writing shed.

  I uncoiled the lead for the sockets and made a pot of coffee. And then I raised my glass of coffee to that writer from Bucharest. ‘How are you?’ I said to her in my head. ‘I hope things are going well for you.’ We had laughed together in Austria because she told me that someone in the audience had put up their hand and declared they wanted to know more about the country of her birth. She had lived in one of the most oppressive communist regimes in the world and was waiting for a big question about how a writer might work with language when freedoms are demolished, or about the struggle to remember and forget and put herself together again. She feared she might not be able to answer it. ‘Could you please tell me if it’s safe to drink the tap water there?’ this person wanted to know. To which she and I had later both added, ‘Could you please give me the Wi-Fi password, and are there mosquitoes?’

  This writing shed was very close to the life I wanted, even if it was a temporary arrangement. I mean it was not my real estate, I did not own it, I was renting it, but I owned its mood. Even the English birds chirping and calling in NW8 seemed tropical. I had still not completely moved out of my old writing shed, but Celia (my old shed landlady) had put her house up for sale and I knew I had to make other arrangements.

  The new shed was near the Abbey Road, where I would set my novel The Man Who Saw Everything. I was haunting the Abbey Road and it was haunting me. ‘Home is where the haunt is,’ wrote the late, great essayist Mark Fisher, and that was certainly true for me. In a way I was still a spectral occupant of the old writing shed because many of my books were languishing on its shelves. My desktop computer still lived on the desk, now covered in a white sheet. The Provençal heater I had bought to heat it in winter had become a home for small spiders and their vast geometric webs.

  Meanwhile, a spectre lurked right here in the new shed on the first page of one of the books I had brought with me. I noticed there was an inscription inside it from the father of my children in the year 1999, when I was married and lived in our family house.