A mix of myths

With ‘both arms stretched out like a starfish, her long hair floating like seaweed at the sides of her body’, Kitty Finch swam naked into view in Deborah Levy’s Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home. Similarly, in Hot Milk, Sofia Papastergiadis loves to swim —as, indeed, does Levy herself. Only, whereas Kitty swims up and down the gravelike plot of a villa’s swimming pool, Sofia prefers the open expanse of the sea.

She swims off the coast of Spain, in Almeria, where she is helping her mother find treatment for the periodic ‘mysterious’ paralysis of her legs. Caring for her mother means that she has given up pursuing a doctorate in anthropology, despite her first-class degree. She reflects that her ‘mother tongue’ is ‘the language of symptoms and side effects’ and recalls, soon after her father left, climbing into bed with her mother — who felt as though she was ‘folding her growing child back into her womb in the way an aeroplane folds its wheels back into its body after take-off’. Their bodies remain unnaturally linked, as Sofia shakes the doctor’s hand on her mother’s behalf — ‘her arm is my arm’ — and finds herself adopting her limp — ‘my legs are her legs’. She swims alone, however. Levy catches Sofia at the moment of severing her filial bond: ‘My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts deep.’

If there are whispers of Electra in Sofia, the Greek daughter with her axe-like love for her mother (a chapter is even titled ‘Matricide’), then another myth which Levy invites us to read into her story is that of Medusa. Sofia swims in a sea awash with stinging jellyfish, or ‘medusas’, as they are called in Spain.