One Perfect Sunday

Today I get to stay home with my reading, writing and my thoughts. I just had the perfect Sunday lunch, a poppy seed bagel (though it’s a day old), some Edam cheese and fresh leafy salad with wild rocket (Arugula) , olives and cherry tomatoes thrown in. At a dinner party last month, I was telling an acquaintance who hailed from Normandy where he could get Normandy butter locally, he said the best French butter was this soft organic butter that he could not recall the brand and would text me later so he did two days later. I managed to pick up a bar of  ‘Le Gall Cru Moule Doux’from a grocer on Friday evening. Indeed this particular brand of French butter tastes heavenly. 

I’m  re-reading The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy .Whenever I stumble on some writings or books that I feel friends who read might enjoy, I have to curb the impulse of getting additional copies as gifts. Not only the gesture is neither economical nor prudent, but my intention might end up weighing on another reader or bibliophile’s conscience to read when he or she has already had a long reading list and books that they cannot wait to devour with relish.  As I have taken to reading several books at any given time, inevitably some books get a false start and I have to resume from the beginning while others may take some time to reach the finishing line. Nonetheless,though I do not believe in multitasking, I still believe in reading multiple books at any given time.

As I mentioned in my earlier posts that I had enjoyed Levy’s writings and apart from reading  Hot Milk click and Swimming Home click my subsequent reads were by her as well. The Cost of Living is the second installment of  Levy’s living autobiography on writing and womanhood. As she approaches fifty years of age, she is a mother of two teenage daughters and has to reinvent her life after her divorce from a man whom she has shared a life together for two decades. During the same period, she is also dealing with the bereavement of losing her mother. Her introspections are unassuming and relatable. She is able to present the past alongside the presence without using any flashback and her prose is impeccable. Her essays read like scenes from a play or a black and white film.

‘ To separate from love is to live a risk-free life. What’s the point of that sort of life?’ Levy muses. She writes,

 ‘To live without love is a waste of time . I was living in the Republic of Writing and Children. I was not Simone de Beauvoir after all. No, I had got off the train at a different stop (marriage) and stepped on to a different platform ( children). She was my muse but I was certainly not hers.

All the same we had both bought a ticket (earned with our own money ) for the same train. The destination was to head towards a freer life. That is a vague destination, no one knows what it looks like when we get there. It is a journey without end, but I did not know that then. I was just on my way.’

In my twenties, I  read Simone de Beauvoir when I was supposed to reading  cases and law texts. Despite her enduring love and commitment  for Sartre,  Simone de Beauvoir  resolved never to marry him and make a home with Jean-Paul Sartre  as ‘she knew she never wanted children or to serve his breakfast or run his errands or pretend she was not intellectually engaged with the world to make herself more loveable to him.’

What Simone de Beauvoir did in the 1950s was indeed very radical then.

Here are some other snippets from Deborah Levy’s memoir under the chapter entitled “ The Black and Bluish Darkness”

“ Actually , I had no idea what serenity felt like. Serenity is supposed to be one of the main characters in old-fashioned femininity’s cultural personality. She is serene and she endures. Yes, she is so talented at enduring and suffering they might even be the main characters in her story.

It was possible that femininity, as I had been taught it , had come to an end. Femininity, as a cultural personality, was no longer expressive for me. It was obvious that femininity, as written by men and performed by women, was the exhausted phantom that still haunted the early twenty-first century. What would it cost to step out of character and stop the story?’ “ The phantom of femininity is an illusion, a delusion, a societal hallucination. She is a very tricky character to play and it is a role (sacrifice, endurance, cheerful suffering ) that has made some women go mad. This was not a story I wanted to hear all over again.

It was time to find new main characters with other talents.

She also writes,

“ And what could I say to my daughters? ‘Um, I’m not like those mothers who lived through you, no no, not at all.’

In The Cost of Living, Deborah Levy muses about female autonomy and societal roles. Her memoir is about writing and what it is to be a woman. Her contemplations are insightful, clever and infused with humour and warmth.

Family

I love bookshops. When I visit a foreign city,  if I chance upon a bookshop  or know of a bookshop around the corner, I will definitely head there. Once I picked up Le Petit Prince in French  from a bookshop in Lyon.  It is now sitting in my elder daughter’s bedroom. I have read the book  in English and yet to read it in French. It is on my reading list.

I’m always on the lookout for new books. You will be surprised at the books that you acquire when you walk into a bookshop  in a foreign city.

In a foreign country where English is not the first language, when I check out  the local bookstores I do see interesting English language books. Once my daughter and I stayed at Hostel Book and Bed Ikebukuro in Tokyo , I had to resist the temptation of purchasing  their bookbag. If not for the fact that I could barely manage  my big luggage containing winter clothing  and that  I could not possibly lug along more books apart from those I have already brought from home, I would have bought their bookbag. 

Once I was  in Brisbane, inside a shop at the Botanical Garden, I picked up a little book entitled Adrenalin Junkies by Matt Church. The book talks  about the major natural chemicals that contribute to mood change and how adrenalin is a powerful chemical force if it is used well but prolonged periods of high level adrenalin can leave you edgy and have an adrenalin crash. It is important to balance our body chemistry so we can achieve a calm readiness. Food and exercise play a role in increasing serotonin level. Serotonin is the chemical of happiness and enduring motivation and I cannot agree more.

During my recent visit to Singapore, my daughters took me to the Moon Bookstore and caféclick.  The books are arranged by colour. I picked up Hot Milk by Deborah Levy right away after reading its opening paragraph.

                                         ‘2015. Almeria. Southern Spain. August

Today I dropped my laptop on the concrete floor of a bar built on the beach. It was tucked under my arm and slid out of its black rubber sheath (designed like an envelope), landing screen side down. The digital page is now shattered but at least it still works. My laptop has all my life in it and knows more about me than anyone else.

      So what I am saying is that if it is broken, so am I.’

 Hot Milk is a story about a mother and daughter relationship. Sofia Papastergiadis, aged 25  is a half-Greek anthropology graduate. She has to abandon her low-income job as a barista in a café in  West London and put her PhD on hold to care for her hypochondriac English mother, Rose who has raised her single-handedly. Rose’s chronic paralysis is a mystery to various UK doctors so both mother and daughter set out to Spain to seek a cure from Dr Gomez. Rose has re-mortgaged her house in Hackney to pay for her medical treatment and physiotherapy, a total cost of twenty-five thousand euro. Sophia accompanies her mother to spend a month in Andalusia to ‘decipher her aches and pains, their triggers and motivations.’ During her stay with her mother, she makes a trip to Athens to visit her father whom she has not seen for eleven years. Her dad has a new baby by Alexandra his young wife who is only four years older than her. The story is narrated in Sofia’s voice.

‘Things got worse. It turns out that Alexandra is a minor mainstream economist. This was useful, because I have come to Athens to call in a debt my father owes me for never being around. Perhaps in his own mind he has absolved himself by putting all his late paternal energy into my sister, Evangeline.’

Deborah Levy writes,

‘ But his debts go back a long way. As a result of his first default, my mother has a mortgage on my life.’

She  also writes,

‘ What is money?

Money is a medium of exchange. Jade, oxen, rice, eggs, beads, nails, pigs and amber have all been used for making payments and recording debts and credits. And so have children. I have been traded off for Alexandra and Evangeline, but I am supposed to pretend not to notice.

 Pretending not to notice and pretending to forget are my special skills. If I were to pluck out my eyes, it would please my father, but memory is like a bar code, I am the human scanner.’

Growing old is not fun but Mrs Rose Papastergiadis is just sixty-four years old, not that old really. She complains of chronic knuckle in her left hand, pain in the inside of her elbow and all kinds of  mysterious symptoms. Sofia’s narration is interjected with humour.

  ‘  If I see myself as an unwilling detective with a desire for justice, does that make her illness an unsolved crime? If so, who is the villain and who is the victim? Attempting to decipher her aches and pains, their triggers and motivations, is a good training for an anthropologist. There have been times when I thought I was on the verge of a major revelation and knew where the corpses were buried, only to be thwarted once again. Rose merely presents a new and entirely mysterious symptom for which she is prescribed new and entirely mysterious medication. The UK doctors recently prescribed  anti-depressants for her feet. That’s what she told me – they are for the nerve endings in her feet.’

Sofia has to become bolder and more independent and not tied to her mother’s grievances. It is a self-discovery journey and wake-up call for Sofia and her mother. 

Hot Milk is a coming of age story. Its prose is poetic and  its story though simple, imaginative and cleverly crafted by its author . It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize. I was truly glad to  discover another contemporary writer and will be reading more of Deborah Levy's writings.