Welcome to Litsy!

When The Poet throws back her head and roars with laughter, my cat stares into her mouth with wonder.

To name someone is to give them a country.
To give them a country is to give them an address.
To give them an address is to give them a home.
To give them a home is to give them a wardrobe.
To give them a wardrobe is to give them a mirror.

What does Y see in her mirror?

Two early works by Levy. I felt wrong-footed & baffled through much of Beautiful Mutants, a surreal commentary on the anxieties of modern life. In the second novella, Swallowing Geography, I felt more relaxed & therefore able to immerse myself. In this one, Levy explores similar themes to those in Hot Milk, including bisexuality & a daughter‘s relationship to her difficult mother. In both novellas, the language thrilled me.

The arrogance of metaphor when facts save people‘s lives. The succour of metaphor when facts inadequately describe people‘s lives.

(Author photo from Internet)

There is a beast inside JK. It is a mammoth, frozen in ice. It inhabits the colony of her interior and sometimes it stirs. While her mother writes the hymn of hate, she can feel it nudge its big ugly head against the ice. When her mother says, “I love you so much,” it lies down again and rests. “You are going away again,” says her mother. “Good riddance.”

I predict a wonderful future for us all. You will meet the love of your life on a bridge in July, your children will be healthy and happy and never have to beg on trains in January, there will be enough rain to water the crops in August, bees will never become extinct in April, libraries will be open 24 hours in May, no one will drill for oil under your house in November and everyone will be educated in February. 👇

I ached to be different from the women in my home town. But it‘s hard to be enchanting and carefree and spiritual when you‘re dead broke. I wanted either to take part in the world, to taste it, to dare search out joy and claim it, or not be here at all. I wanted there to be more to life than just surviving it. I wanted and I wanted.

The good news is, Levy is now a terrific writer. But the first novella in this regrettable reissue of her early stuff was so god-awful I couldn‘t make it past page 12. It sounded like all of the characters, and/or the writer, were on acid. And not the kind of trip that triggers profundities; the kind that spews inane verbal diarrhea.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON USED BOOK HAUL #1 of 7

I finished Hot Milk the other day: it knocked my socks off. So I was pleased to stumble across this!