Deborah Levy's Literary Evolution: A Journey Through Books
Acclaimed South African author Deborah Levy has revealed the books that have shaped her life and writing career, from childhood classics to contemporary subversive novels. In a candid exploration of her reading history, Levy discusses the works that terrified, inspired, and transformed her perspective on literature and life.
Early Literary Foundations
Levy's earliest reading memory centers on The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss, with particular fascination for the little red fan the cat holds in its tail. By age five, she was immersed in Enid Blyton's The Famous Five series, grappling with what she describes as Blyton's "most complex characters"—Aunt Fanny and Uncle Quentin. Growing up in apartheid South Africa, Levy found the world of the Famous Five particularly striking, noting that these children "had no human rights problems" and inhabited a Dorset landscape completely foreign to her Johannesburg upbringing, where her bedroom window looked out on "a garden of bone-white grass and a peach tree."
Childhood Favorites and Terrifying Encounters
The author expressed delight in moving to the "imaginative sophistication" of C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. She credits Lewis's "lucky strike" of using a wardrobe as a portal to another world. Despite the terror the White Witch inspired, Levy confesses she "wanted to meet" this character who rode a sleigh pulled by white reindeer.
Adolescent Transformations
As a teenager, Colette's Chéri profoundly changed Levy. She was drawn to "the sex and sadness about ageing and desire," which she admits she didn't fully understand at fourteen. The novel's French setting, a country she had never visited, added to its allure. Levy found it unusual to encounter a story where "the male character's only power in life is his beauty." She read it secretly on the school bus when she was supposed to be studying John Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn.
Midlife Revelations and Writerly Inspirations
Around her forties, Levy discovered J.G. Ballard's later fiction, which she describes as finding "an intellectually entertaining way to air his preoccupations and obsessions." She cites Cocaine Nights as particularly influential, featuring a charismatic tennis coach at a Mediterranean expat resort who is actually a psychopath—yet remains likable enough that people "would even vote for him." Levy recognized this as "a beguiling social and psychological critique disguised as a beach novel," which changed her approach to handling her own writerly concerns, particularly those involving beaches and swimming pools.
James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and Marguerite Duras's The Lover stand as the defining texts that steer Levy's writing. She attributes this to "the depth charge of the prose, its beauty and pain, plenty of wit and high emotion."
Philosophical Returns and Rediscoveries
Levy regularly returns to Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, finding his philosophical reflections on attics, cellars, corridors, nooks and crannies, doors and corners "always surprising and inspiring." However, she admits she "tends not to revisit books I totally could not get on with," explaining that "we just have nothing to say to each other."
Later in life, while writing her living autobiographies, Levy rediscovered Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She praises how Angelou brings to life her childhood with a formidable grandmother in "the brutal, racist American south of the 1930s." Levy describes Angelou's writing voice as "a massive blast" that "cuts through more conventional autobiographies" with its "truth, power, historical reach" and "skilful lift from life into literature."
Current Reading and Subversive Discoveries
Levy is currently reading Asako Yuzuki's 2017 novel Butter, which she describes as "a subversive novel about escaping from everyday misogyny." She particularly loves a scene where the narrator, after enduring "a day being undermined at work and a night of bad sex," slips out of her boyfriend's bed at 2am to find a place serving "consoling noodles. With butter, of course."
Deborah Levy's latest work, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, is published by Hamish Hamilton and available now.
