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I began this review and then happened on Ilse’s typically exhilarating review. Follow her, friend her. Be inspired by her. So I will be uncharacteristically short:

Deborah Levy's 'Living Autobiography' is the third in her series of what she calls a Living Autobiography, and it is the liveliest and funniest and most engaging of the three books. The first, Things I Don’t Want to Know, is about her childhood in South Africa and England; The Cost of Living is about her divorce and the death of her mother, and this third is about facing sixty, trying to make a home. It’s in part a (feminist) response to George Orwell in “Why I Write,�� and also a response to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.

“I was also searching for a house in which I could live and work and make a world at my own pace, but even in my imagination this home was blurred, undefined, not real, or not realistic, or lacked realism.��

“The house with the pomegranate tree was my major acquisition. In this sense, I owned some unreal estate. The odd thing was that every time I tried to see myself inside this grand old house, I felt sad. It was as if the search for home was the point, and now that I had acquired it and the chase was over, there were no more branches to put in the fire.��

“I began to wonder what myself and all unwritten and unseen women would possess in their property portfolios at the end of their lives. Literally, her physical property and possessions, and then everything else she valued, though it might not be valued by society. What might she claim, own, discard and bequeath? Or is she the real estate, owned by patriarchy? In this sense, Real Estate is a tricky business. We rent it and buy it, sell and inherit it - but we must also knock it down.��

The tone of this volume is lighter, more playful. A central event she riffs off is a meeting with a famous film producer, who asks her to make a list of the central characters in a proposed film script. Over time, she begins to see that the “real estate�� that is home for her is one she imagines in her fictions. What happens through the three volumes is her quoting the central characters/authors who have influenced her, including Duras, De Beauvoir, and in this one, she has in mind always Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. As opposed to the first two books where she rarely mentions any males, rarely seems to smile (hey, divorce and death are hard, of course) here she hangs with My Best Male Friend, her friend since youth, who helps her conceptualize her life post-sixty.

I liked reading all three short books but I have this feeling I would have liked them all better had I seen her life through her fiction, which I have yet to read. I think I'll read Swimming home this year.