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Swimming Home

Deborah Levy

Paperback | Pages: 165 pages

Rating: 3.32 | 9467 Users | 1201 Reviews

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Title	:	Swimming Home
Author	:	Deborah Levy
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 165 pages
Published	:	October 6th 2011 by And Other Stories
Categories	:	Fiction. Literary Fiction. Contemporary. Novels

Description As Books Swimming Home

I’m really at a loss to understand why this novella shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 did not win it. This is a perfect book. The prose is magnificent and a tour de force by an author with an exquisite handling particularly of the mental state in human beings.

The setting is July 1994, in a villa up in the hills from Nice in the Alpes-Maritime, one of my favourite places in southern France. A famous poet, Jozef Jacobs, known as Joe, and his wife Isabel, a former war correspondent, are on holiday with their teenage daughter Nina. Other household guests are Laura and Mitchell, who own a shop in Euston, London. Isabel has known Laura for many years but they are certainly not close friends, if anything they are used to one another, and are comfortable together.

A mix-up in the letting of the villa sees the arrival of Kitty Finch, who is friendly with the Austrian caretaker Jurgen. He was rather taken with Kitty and called her Kitty Ket whilst thinking of any conceivable manoeuvre to get closer to her in more ways than one. Isabel, decides that the villa is more than large enough for them and Kitty is invited to stay by her. The reason for this is apparent later on. Pubescent Nina has become interested in Claude, a friend of Jurgen, who owns the only café in the village and looks like Mick Jagger.

Not a very exciting story you may think but think again. Slowly, the problems in Joe’s and Isabel’s marriage and its fragility become apparent, the worries that Nina has, the eighty year old retired Doctor Madeleine Sheridan who views from the balcony next door the development of the family’s encounter with Kitty and who knows the latter’s extraordinary background, and Mitchell and Laura.

Talk about bated breath with every single page I read, this book sizzled with secrets, sensuality, depression, depravity, deception, fear, insecurity and I cannot list all the other factors that came into the equation. Every single comment, be it regarding an insect or whatever, is enhanced. The descriptions are vivid. What to any individual would appear as trivia become of vital importance. Every utterance is an impact on life.

The theme centres around water and especially the swimming pool and the fact that Kitty had written a poem that she wished Joe to read. Kitty is a botanist and she is following a specific agenda in life. It was rather disturbing to find out what it was.

The poem of Sir Walter Scott springs to mind:

“Oh! What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive"…

The intensity of the writing and the attention to detail, never mind the style, are absolutely breathtaking.

The novella surges relentlessly towards its rather unexpected conclusion. The ending was not at all what I had envisaged.

Spectacular – that’s the only word I can possibly use.

List Books During Swimming Home

Original Title:	Swimming Home
ISBN:	1908276029 (ISBN13: 9781908276025)
Edition Language:	English
Setting:	France Côte d'Azur(France)
Literary Awards:	Booker Prize Nominee (2012), Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize Nominee (2013)

Rating Based On Books Swimming Home

Ratings: 3.32 From 9467 Users | 1201 Reviews

Write Up Based On Books Swimming Home

The antiquarian bookstore I most often frequent has two sections: "Fiction and Literature," where you'd find Michael Ondaatje and Grace Paley and Lorrie Moore, and "General Fiction," where you'd find Nicholas Sparks and Jodi Picoult and Candace Bushnell. I found Swimming Home in the latter section. Don't blame the staff. Blame the covers of the most recent editions, with their benevolent blues and suburban lawn greens. Blame the title (which serves in the novel as the title of a poem-cum-suicide

Deborah Levy is an interesting writer. There is a visual quality to her work that makes the reader blink. Is this a novel, or is it a film, we ask ourselves? Are we reading or watching? We become immobile in front of the screen of her set pieces, watching passively as the events happen before our eyes, as if in a documentary or a piece of reality TV. But there is no voice over, hardly any backstory, and no linking of scenes. What we see is all there is so we have to make of it what we can.There

When Swimming Home was longlisted for the Booker Prize, I was elated. Not because I'd already read the book, but because, having read an early review that had piqued my interest, I had been trying to get hold of a copy of it for months and hadn't even managed to see one. Now it's actually been shortlisted, it has of course been re-published in paperback with a more WH Smith-friendly cover, and suddenly it's everywhere.Like last year's winner, The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, Swimming

Shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, this slim book reads like a play, the action centered on a small group of people gathered at a tourist villa in seaside France. Levy is a playwright and poet as well as a novelist, and this informs her fiction. Description is given like stage direction: His daughter, Nina Jacobs, fourteen years old, standing at the edge of the pool in her new cherry-print bikini, glanced anxiously at her mother. The poetry comes through in the spare and precise

Over the past few years, Ive found the Man Booker shortlist to be a pretty reliable source of new, interesting books I wouldnt have discovered otherwise, like 2011s excellent Pigeon English and The Sisters Brothers, or, from 2010, Room, Andrea Levys amazing The Long Song, and Tom McCarthys weird-but-interesting C. This year, however, while Bring Up the Bodies was absolutely brills, the two shortlisted works Ive read - this book and The Garden of Evening Mists - have been absolute Crap City. I

Move over, Truman Capote. Holly Go-Lightly has met her match and then some in Kitty Finch, the strange young botanist who insinuates herself into the vacation home rented by a renowned poet and his little family. Her allure tattoos itself into the thin skin of the poet's marriage, and we root for him as he works to resist her copper coils and long limbs. She insists that they share the same mindset and perhaps if not thoughts, then emotions. They are 'in nerve contact,' she insists. In one of

How to begin talking about this novel?I am reminded, seeing how much attention this book didn't get (though it was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize), and how unenthusiastic the response by GR reviewers, that I shouldn't trust GR star ratings or at least I shouldn't be following them like breadcrumbs that will necessarily lead me to a compelling book. Of course, I know this, but I must often be reminded. It is so easy to dismiss something "unpopular" (not sure if that is the best word) in this