The Position of Spoons
And Other Intimacies
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A feast of observations about everything from the particular beauty of lemons on a table, to the allure of Colette, to the streets of Paris, by the inimitable Deborah Levy.
Deborah Levy’s vital literary voice speaks about many things.
On footwear: “It has always been very clear to me that people who wear shoes without socks are destined to become my friends and lovers.” On public parks: “A civic garden square gentles the pace of the city that surrounds it, holding a thought before it scrambles.” On Elizabeth Hardwick: “She understands what is at stake in literature.” On the conclusion of a marriage: “It doesn’t take an alien to tell us that when love dies we have to find another way of being alive.”
Levy traces and measures her life against the backdrop of different literary imaginations; each page is a beautiful, questioning composition of the self. The Position of Spoons is full of wisdom and astonishments and brings us into intimate conversation with one of our most insightful, intellectually curious writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and playwright Levy (August Blue) delivers a dazzling collection of musings on art, aging, psychoanalysis, celebrity car crashes, and more. The stylish essays—some as brief as one page—run the gamut from funny reflections on the Mona Lisa ("Her hair looks uncared for under her hood. She probably has lice") and oral sex ("a super sport that should be included in the Olympic games") to weightier considerations of the human tendency to look away from discomfort. Of model and photographer Lee Miller, whose career took her from fashion runways to documenting the liberation of Buchenwald, Levy writes, "she both hides from and gives herself to the camera." Taken together, Levy's extraordinary observations (eggs are "sculptures" that "have the added uncanny allure of being an artwork that is made inside the body of a hen") amount to a trip through a consciousness trained to deeply consider everything it encounters—be it a pair of shoes, a bowl of lemons, or the work of Simone de Beauvoir. "There is the story and then there is everything else," Levy posits. Here, she gives space to everything else, with sublime results. Readers will be grateful for this generous peek inside a singular mind.
