When she gets out of the pool, Kitty Finch feigns shock, saying someone must have messed up her schedule and told her she could be at the villa that week. One Saturday, to everyone’s surprise, there is a naked body in the villa’s pool. We also have Mitchell and Laura, the Jacobs’ friends, who have come along a bit awkwardly. We have the Jacobs: Joe is the father and “the arsehole poet known to his readers as JHJ his wife is Isabel (she calls her husband Jozef), a war correspondent who understandably has a hard time reconciling her home life with her work life their fourteen-year-old daughter is Nina, more aware than people give her credit for. It’s the summer of 1994, and two families have decided to vacation together in the Alpes-Maritime. Levy quickly gets to work setting up a simple stage on which the characters will subtly terrorize each other. In his introduction, Tom McCarthy (author of C, which I reviewed here) writes, “Like the emotional and cerebral choreographies of Pina Bausch, her fiction seemed less concerned about the stories it narrated than about the interzone (to borrow Burrough’s term) it set up in which desire and speculation, fantasy and symbols circulated.” Will we really get a shortlist where a book like Harold Fry, which is very concerned about the story it’s telling, can coexist with Swimming Home, where the story is not at all what matters? At least a few judges - and, who knows, but I’m guessing not the same ones who liked Harold Fry - opted to include Deborah Levy’s anti-sentimental, formally challenging Swimming Home (2011). On the one hand, at least a few of the judges opted to include Rachel Joyce’s rather conventional, sentimental journey The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (my review here).
This year’s judges of the Man Booker Prize seem to have quite a task in front of them when they sit to whittle the longlist down to a shortlist. Swimming Home by Deborah Levy (2011) And Other Stories (2011) 165 pp
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