Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Winner of the 2021 Christopher Isherwood (and LA Times) Prize for Autobiographical Prose

I own the books that I have written and bequeath the royalties to my daughters. In this sense, my books are my real estate. They are not private property. There are no fierce dogs or security guards at the gate and there are no signs forbidding anyone to dive, splash, kiss, fail, feel fury or fear or be tender or tearful, to fall in love with the wrong person, go mad, become famous or play on the grass.

This is the third volume in Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography series (after “Things I Don’t Want to Know� and “The Cost of Living�), this was published in 2021, two years after her Booker longlisting for “The Man Who Saw Everything�.

The book opens in London in January 2018. The author is approaching sixty and over the last few years has gained a degree of (in modern literary writing terms) commercial success, but it still conscious that compared to writers of previous generations (some of whom bought large houses from their success) or some of her contemporaries (with paid off mortgages and second homes) she lacks a grand old house of her own where she can live and work and write. Instead she builds the house both in her imagination and by starting to accumulate possessions for it. At the same time he real flat is about to become a one person home as her younger daughter sets out for university.

She also reflects on how females � both characters in books and real women, particularly married with children, are in effect written out of their own story � this in turn leads her to reflect on whether women are “real estate owned by the patriarchy�.

And these two themes around different types of real estate interleave throughout the book (whose chapters are set in different cities � London, New York, Paris, Greece, Mumbai, Berlin) giving it perhaps more of a coherence of theme than the first two novels, even while at the same time it has much of the same writing style and underlying themes (motherhood, femininity, the patriarchy, the writing life) and a developing group of characters from the second volume.

Each of the volumes in the trilogy follows two years after one of Levy’s novels and there are links and references in the previous volumes to the relevant novel â€� but the links to “The Man Who Saw Everythingâ€� are much more extensive and explicit here â€� which I particularly enjoyed as it is my favourite of Levy’s novel and one I read and re-read and discussed at length with Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friends.

When it became clearer to me that the main male character in The Man Who Saw Everything was going to live simultaneously in different points in time, I found that it was so technically hard to melt time in a work of literature, I had to write in all time zones.

To work is to live without dying. Rilke

I was creating a male character who literally was trying to find a way of living without dying. He was running out of time. There were spectres, historical and personal, coming out to play in what remained of his life. He himself would become a spectre three seconds after the very last line in the book. There were spectres in the shadows of my own life too: childhood, Africa, love, loneliness, ageing, my mother, all the unreal estate in my property portfolio.

A wonderful end to an outstanding trilogy.

My thanks to Hamish Hamilton, Penguin for ARCs (and the other two volumes in the series) via NetGalley