Review: Hot Milk, Deborah Levy

Hi, it's Adalya with my second review from this years Man Booker Prize shortlist. This week I'm looking at Deborah Levy's Hot Milk.

Hot Milk follows Sofia and her mother Rose as they travel from England to clinic of questionable merit in Spain, seeking answers to Rose's litany of mysterious ailments. Set in the searing heat of Southern Spain, Sofia undergoes a twisted iteration of the classic beach sexual awakening narrative while Rose undergoes Dr Gomez's treatment. As the reliability of the mother who so shapes Sofia's life and identity becomes shaky, the importance of her relationship to her father and his Greek heritage becomes a new fixation.

Levy's writing is lucid and evocative. Images recur, morph and intermingle in unexpected ways. Her exploration of what it means to form an identity around illness and what it means to form an identity in inverse to somebody else is arresting and important.

We are drawn immediately into Sofia's inner world, a stilted filter on reality. Even the dialogue felt unnatural, characters voices indistinguishable from Sofia's own. At times this claustrophobia was transfixing, but at times it felt like there were links we were missing.

Perhaps it was the many strengths of Levy's work that left me feeling so ambivalent towards the end product. Despite its compelling subjects and beautiful prose, Hot Milk lacked any real sense of cohesiveness. Ideas and narrative were not coherently woven together and the result was just a sense of loss at what could have been. The scenes in Greece, for example, could have occurred at almost any place in the book, so separate they were from any other element. Hot Milk is by no mean's Levy's first work, so I think these failures felt greater than they would have had it been a debut.

To be honest I am surprised and a little disappointed that Hot Milk made the shortlist. I haven't read the full longlist, but for me, The North Water and My Name is Lucy Barton at least were both stronger works than Hot Milk.

All that said, I know there are lots of people who have loved and will love this book. I think perhaps a difficulty in reviewing book and especially books nominated for a prize is that the craft of the work is placed on equal footing to that craft's effect, whereas I think when we read a book without this consideration the effect is our primary interest. Hot Milk did not come together for me, but perhaps it would have if I had not had reviewing it in the back of my mind as I read it.

With last years Booker for example, lots of writers I saw felt that, although they had been profoundly emotionally involved in Hanya Yanigihara's A Little Life, that the strings used to emotionally effect us were too present for Yanigihara to deserve the win. I think this is a reasonable and even important consideration to make, but I guess it does beg the question why or even whether it is worth paying attention to these awards at all if their priorities are so different to that of the average reader.

I guess the very fact that I've undertaken this project means that I must think they are, but I think it is important to act in dialogue with the institutions you give power to.

Please stick around next week as I continue to discuss the rest of the Man Booker shortlist and question the very premise of this project!

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