Black Vodka - Deborah Levy

...vacating the room when her reader is mid-step...

pp.125
Publisher: And Other Stories, 2013.

'Only some of this is true, but you should know that this does not scare me as much as the promise of love.' So reads the last line of the title story in Black Vodka, and it's a line that really cuts to the heart of what love means in this handful of stories by Booker-shortlisted author of Swimming Home Deborah Levy.

Here, love is a loaded thing, something to be feared - Gordian in perplexity, devastating in impact. It is certainly not portrayed in a flattering light. In 'Vienna', a man realises that his mistress, who 'is dead inside', doesn't need him. In 'Cave Girl', a boy falls in love with his sister who has undergone surgery to drastically alter her appearance. In 'Placing a Call', the narrator's spouse has passed away and in the resulting disorientation she tries to piece together the details of her everyday life.

There is a sense of fracture caused by love (or longing), and it is this fracture that Levy twists into a collection of original, obscure stories.

All of the stories are curiously difficult to approach. They maintain a mysterious distance, and I am not sure whether this is a result of the pared-down, affectless style reminiscent of someone like DeLillo, or whether it is the stories themselves in the way they pause on the threshold of meaning ... and never quite take the next step, the one the reader yearns for.

This way Levy has of vacating the room when her reader is mid-step is her most tremendous gift. To say it leaves one craving more is an understatement, but the main thing it achieves is much more important than that. Take 'Placing a Call', for instance. The three page story is a maddening jumble of impressions:

'We are standing in the garden and it's autumn and there's a bird in the tree that imitates a telephone when it sings. Your hair is silver but you are not old. Under your soft silver hair is your skull with your central nervous system inside it. It is dusk and it has started to rain.'

How should we approach such prose? Is it that we are to select the most significant impressions and make a story of those alone? Or is it more complex than that? Perhaps, more than anything, it is the inconsequential impressions that are most significant. Perhaps the story is imitating the prosaic suffering of grief. The senseless jumble that life can become following a death.

Thus the onus is on us to exhume (and I'm talking about the entire collection now) a more tangible and well-formed meaning out of a series of very astute and highly crafted impressions. It would be so easy for Levy to lay answers at our feet. Instead, her skill lies in ellipsis, in taking out the superfluous and leaving these bare yet bursting stories, delicate in their need for logical expression.

The power, ultimately, is given to us. Our first impression of helplessness in the face of these mysterious stories is actually a misconstrued position of power. Levy gives her readers power on a scale unlike most other authors.

Particular highlights include: 'Black Vodka' (the title story), about a modern day hunchback who works at an advertising agency and finds himself faced with a skewed sort of love; 'Shining a Light', which deals excellently with displacement, wartime immigration and loss; 'Simon Tegala's Heart in 12 Parts', a very funny encapsulation of all of Levy's themes throughout the collection (loss, change, the physical body, desire vs. love).