Emily Rhodes

The stuff of everyday life: Real Estate, by Deborah Levy, reviewed

In her third volume of autobiography, Levy reveals her talent for unearthing the extraordinary beneath the mundane

Deborah Levy. Credit: Getty Images

Real Estate is the third and concluding volume of Deborah Levy’s ground-breaking ‘Living Autobiography’. Fans of Levy’s alluring, highly allusive fiction will appreciate the insights into her life; moreover, anyone with an ounce of curiosity will be fascinated by her compelling tour of city streets, island rocks and meandering diversions into ideas from a wealth of writers and artists.

We begin the book with the author buying a plant from a flower stall. (Our modern-day Mrs Dalloway purchases a banana tree in Shoreditch rather than cut flowers in Westminster.) Levy then steps from this familiar act of flower-buying into the world of Georgia O’Keeffe, and we accompany her ‘from the bagel shops and grey cobblestones of east London to the deserts and mountains of New Mexico’, where she presents us with a beautiful quotation from the artist: ‘When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.’

She describes O’Keeffe’s home, and lingers over its oval fireplace, a ‘burning egg’, that Levy covets for her ideal home. So we are off on a further digression about her fantasy home, her ‘unreal estate’, glimpsing the shadow of the book’s title, Real Estate. Immediately, we see Levy’s talent for revealing the extraordinary hiding beneath the mundane, her freewheeling skill for interrogating quotidian acts and examining commonplace expressions to take us beyond their surface simplicity into complex depths.

Ideas introduced in these early pages resurface throughout the book. Levy’s love for the banana tree becomes a point on which her two daughters tease her — noticing how her nurturing instinct has latched on to this ‘third child’, just as her youngest daughter is preparing to leave home for university. The O’Keeffe quotation reappears in Paris, where Levy buys roses wrapped in a Métro map.

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