Hot Milk by Deborah Levy -my review

We are discussing this novel this evening at my Reading Group meeting. It is chez moi so I've just put the white wine in the fridge and found a bottle of red.

Regular readers here will know that I post reviews and mostly those are regular as well. I have kept log of what books I read for many years now so this is just an extension of that. In fact it is that, copied and pasted from my new e reading notebook, which is part of my effort to travel between homes with less stuff. Now instead of several notebooks including the reading log, I have e-notebooks on my iPad.

That's enough of that, here is my review of Hot Milk -a book I gained a lot from and enjoyed more than the last Levy book I read.

Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, Reading Group book, October 2018, 4*

This book is unforgiving in its examination of the mother daughter relationship and the role of the mind in physical illness.Sophia and her Mother, Rose are seeking a cure for Rose’s inability to walk and obsession with pharmaceutical and surgical ways to solve her problems. This is the backdrop to a post-mortem on how family changes cast an indelible mark on individual lives. Levy slowly reveals how Sophia falls apart and her attempts to put herself together whilst all the time thinking others, particularly her Mother, are the problem.

The timeframe and geography (Spain, the beach, the arid countryside) are tight and this gives an air of everything happening in a capsule that might burst at any time. We, as readers, are observers of control lost and gained -the prose reflects this - with incremental shifts of power creating tension and uncertainty. A book lacking in romance, that keeps its attention on the grim realities of how people relate to each other.

Levy offers readers the challenge of first person narration -we only see others via Sophia, and by their actions and speech. She is not exactly unreliable but she is broken so, like her computer screen that she drops in the opening passge, and her, our view has cracks and distortions. Also metaphor use is of note .. the howling dog and the chickens that Sophia rescues which led me to thinking how much this book is about seeking rescue; from ourselves and from the chains we see between us and other people when, as Sophia eventually learns, only we can effect the change we need.  

Its not a long book, it has sections that are uncomfortable to read but it drew me in and i wanted to keep following Sophia's life as it fell like sand though her fingers.