August Blue by Deborah Levy

Elsa, a pianist at the height of her success, walks off the stage in the middle of a concert. In the wake of this professional disaster we follow her through Europe as she questions herself and her family history.

Once I let go of needing to know exactly what was going on I really enjoyed this book! So much to think about - all kinds of themes - but I still questioned all the way through whether I was getting it?! Nevertheless, highly recommended.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book.

Deborah Levy never disappoints! I loved this beautiful book, it was just as wonderful as her others & can’t wait for the next! thanks for letting me read

"What's the point of saying love you and leaving out the I?"

Elsa M. Anderson is a concert pianist who blows her career when she begins playing her own composition during a performance of Rachmaninov in Vienna, before walking off stage. Now, she gives piano lessons. While in Athens, she watches a woman buy a set of mechanical horses. Elsa wants to buy some too, but there are none left. As Elsa travels across Europe, she believes she sees the woman multiple times, as if she's become Elsa's double, a doppelganger, a kind of shadow.

At the same time, Elsa's piano teacher, Arthur, who adopted her as a young child, is dying. She's not spent much time with him and when she arrives in Sardinia, his lover is hostile. Arthur gives her a set of documents – her adoption papers, which she doesn't want to read. She wonders about her mother, but doesn't want to know who she was.

This is a beautifully-written book but at times, I wasn't sure if I completely understood it. Is the doppelganger real? Does she really follow Elsa around? Or, does Elsa imagine this? What was clear to me was that the book is very much about identity. Elsa is defined by her career, by having been a child prodigy, by being adopted by someone who was a father figure and yet, by his own admission, was merciless. She has to fight what others project onto her: about who she is and what she should be.

The book is short, more of a novella really, so it doesn't feel long. I think if I had to spend too much time in Elsa's interior world it may have become oppressive. She's odd. It's clear that she's been affected by a lack of love, particularly during childhood, and yet she doesn't seem to crave it, or at least, pursue it. Even the end of the book doesn't provide a complete resolution. Instead, it left me wondering and kind of wistful.

Thanks to NetGalley for giving me the chance to read August Blue by Deborah Levy in exchange for an honest independent review.

Elsa Anderson is a concert pianist whose hands are insured for millions of pounds. In the middle of a concert she stands up and walks away. Her journey from that moment - internal and external - is related in this book. She is experiencing a breakdown, a disintegration of her identity. So powerful are the forced that have been set in motion, Elsa believes she is followed by a 'double', another woman who she meets in various unexpected places such as Paris, Athens and London. How to survive this kind of splitting off of parts of our personality.

Elsa takes on work - teaching piano to various talented young people. And those characters too, we wonder, are perhaps also parts of Elsa.

She is paying attention, she is learning more about herself and her place in the world.

She is also moving towards her own composition which she struggles to feel she is entitled to write and play.

I struggled a bit with this book at the beginning until I let go to the theme and to the slightly uncomfortable feeling of not really knowing what was going on. As I read I became more engrossed and as I let the story, strange though it is, wash over me, I began to feel I was being given a gift of seeing behind the curtain of a personality.

Recommended so long as you too can let go to the mystery.

A beautifully written story that I enjoyed reading, but if I’m completely honest I’m not sure what the story was about.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for allowing me to read August Blue.

Classic Levy – fans of hers will love it. Enigmatic characters on the edge, hot climates, love affairs, memories. Levy has a talent for imbuing the everyday with a gauzy glamour and making her characters’ inner monologue feel philosophical rather than self-absorbed. Famous concert pianist Elsa has just had a very public nervous breakdown, walking off stage in the middle of a Rachmaninov concert having lost her nerve. The book follows the next few months in her life as she wanders, unmoored through various countries, trying to make sense of who she is. It turns out that she is adopted and she veers between a desperate desire to know who her mother was and a studied uncuriousity. The few friendships she has are longstanding but messy and she flits in and out of her friends’ and lovers’ lives without apparent commitment. The motif of horses recurs and a strange woman who Elsa feels is her doppelganger keeps appearing. Symbolic, mysterious and always atmospheric.

I couldn't decide if August Blue was a work of genius or a literary ramble. And upon finishing, I'm still somewhat on the fence. Elsa (the name, the blue hair, froze on stage - shades of Disney?) drifts around Europe and says goodbye to her mentor and adopted father. The writing carried this novel for me, I struggled with Swimming Home but here the prose was pitch perfect. Definitely not a novel for all, but I did enjoy it, though I'm not sure what I've just read...

Classic (and masterful) new Deborah Levy !

Again, with all her unique style, the author defies all the norms : the narrative as well as the social ones ! The reading layers are infinite.

Here, we follow a 34-year-old world famous pianist, who freezes playing a Rachmaninoff concerto in Vienna. That experience jumpstarts a total new chapter in her life : she dyes her hair blue and becomes a private piano teacher all over the world. While travelling to these different places, she somehow always crosses paths with a woman who looks like her...

The symbols, the shadows and imagery used here are just *chef's kiss*.

I really enjoyed this novel, one of the first I've read that starts to unpack the impact of covid lockdowns on our intellectual and social lives. The main character Elsa, a concert pianist, is reflecting on who she is and what's important to her, following a professional disaster that makes her reconsider her life and relationships.

Deborah Levy is my favourite living author and her 'Living Autobiography' series has genuinely changed my life in terms of older women's place in the world and the need to carve out space for your art. If I had to pick a theme for her work, it is very much created with an ethos of 'who I am and what I want,' even when you're figuring out what those things are.

August Blue is typically Levy, beautiful, strange and humorous all in equal measure. Some would argue that plot is incidental in her fiction writing, but in this case, I greatly enjoyed the themes of this book and the protagonist trying to figure out the truth about her heritage and her desire to create. In typical Deborah Levy fashion, it encompasses travel, art, cinema and music, deftly weaving all the strands while the main character goes hunting for an enigmatic Carmen Sandiago type (she even has the fedora.) Obviously I loved it for its passions - sex, food, music. You'll also find yourself becoming entranced with the life of Isadora Duncan and the need for a pair of snakeskin heels, because, of course you will.

There really is no one else doing it like she does.

The concert pianist, Elsa M. Anderson, former child prodigy, after years of success and fame, gives a disastrous recital in Vienna during which she loses her nerve and walks off stage mid-performance.

The story begins in a market in Athens with Elsa observing a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to herself. As Elsa reflects on what is next for her following the Vienna aberration, she embarks on a journey across Europe which is peppered with encounters, physical and aural, real and imagined, with this ‘double’. Throughout the novel Elsa questions herself (and is questioned by her double).
“Maybe I am”

Levy explores identity, perspective, parenting, childhood and belonging, accompanied by a virtuoso classical music score. Elsa is unsettled and melancholy. Is she chaotically and frighteningly unravelling or trying to rebuild herself anew? Does she persist with the rigour and discipline of delivering her best interpretation of others’ original thinking or does she break free and compose and create for herself? Elsa delves into her early memories, desperately trying to piece together fragments of recollections about her mother, who gave her up as an infant, to create a coherent understanding of where she came from and who she truly is. But when offered documentary evidence of her early life by her mentor and adopted father since the age of 6, now suffering in his twilight days, Elsa hesitates.

Throughout the narrative, dreamlike passages are punctuated with concrete and mundane absolutes, making the reader ponder what is real and what is imagined.

With Deborah Levy, nothing is cut and dried, everything is possible.

Maybe I am.
Maybe I am what?
Challenged, intrigued, charmed, enamoured.

Thank you to NetGalley and Hamish Hamilton for the opportunity to read and review an e-ARC.
August Blue is published on 4th May 2023.

This novel follows Elsa M Anderson, a concert pianist who walks off stage during a concert in Vienna and becomes a bit of a cause celebre. The novel opens after this event with Elsa in Poros, Greece. She is annoyed because a women has bought a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a market stall which she herself had wanted. Elsa becomes fascinated by this women and the horses. She creates a double in this nameless woman 'more knowing than I was, She made me feel less and alone' and the horses 'were a portal into another world'.

Elsa's freeing from the past takes other forms: affecting the wearing of a Trilby hat, a fascination with the dancer Isadora Duncan, and turning to music teaching as Rachmaninov had done (she had walked off stage when playing his Piano Concerto Number 2).

This is a beautiful story of her journey to understand herself and her relationship with her dying adoptive father. In the end she, and her alter ego, has 'ceased to inhabit Rachmaninov's sadness, and dared for a moment to live on our own'.

Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Viking Books for a review copy.

Was possibly slightly underwhelmed, but only because I have such high expectations of Levy. Definitely well-written and an interesting read.

'August Blue' is another beautifully crafted and multi-layered novel from Deborah Levy. Set during the Covid-19 pandemic we follow celebrated concert pianist Elsa M. Anderson on various journeys around Europe. Her career is in jeopardy after she walked off stage mid-performance in Vienna, and she instead travels first to the Greek island of Poros and later to Paris to tutor two young pianists. She later travels to Sardinia to be with her elderly teacher and adopted father, the pianist Arthur Goldstein. On her travels, she repeatedly catches sight of a woman she believes is her 'double' and becomes obsessed with this woman, often conducting imaginary conversations with her.

This summary perhaps makes the novel sound saner than it is. Like Levy's other novels, it is often propelled by a surreal logic (which in this instance also reminded me of another brilliant novel about a concert pianist, Kazuo Ishiguro's 'The Unconsoled') and oscillates between the whimsical and the profound. The novel often fixates on surprising details - a mechanical horse that can be made to dance by pulling its tail, videos of Isadora Godfrey dancing, a trilby hat belonging to Elsa's double which Elsa starts wearing permanently. But these all have a deeper significance, or at least resonance, which sometimes only gradually emerges but contribute to the beguiling nature of this book. It is also, I suspect, a book which will reward multiple re-readings.

Above all, I was drawn to Elsa's desperate quest to make sense of her story and her identity, which is at the heart of her on-stage meltdown in Vienna, her relationship with Arthur and her fixation with her double. The final section of the novel helps us to understand more of the pain which Elsa has carried since coming to live with Arthur at the age of six, and I found the last chapters devastatingly moving. It is also one of the best pandemic novels I have read, perhaps because it wears its topicality lightly - face masks and hand sanitiser do play a role in the novel, but it is more concerned on the emotional impact of lockdown and how it might affect our sense of self.

Although this is a strange, complex, ambiguous novel, it is not a difficult or impenetrable read in the way that some literary fiction can be: it rewards attention but also welcomes the reader in. This is my favourite of Levy's novels that I have read and may well be a serious contender for this year's major literary prizes. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

🔵 REVIEW 🔵

August Blue by Deborah Levy

Publishing Date: 4th May 2023

⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

Elsa is a world renowned pianist, but finds herself at a loss after a disastrous performance in Vienna. She travels around Europe giving private piano tuition to teenagers, and while in Greece she spots her doppelgänger, who then seems to follow her to London and Paris.

This is a very character-centred book, following Elsa as she struggles with her identity and ambition. I enjoyed the first part of the book, and I also thought the writing was very good, but I felt very little attachment to Elsa or her storyline, and I feel like a lot of the meaning of this just went over my head.

It wasn’t bad by any means, but just not my type of book I think…

Divertimenti : Illusive, Elusive, Watery, 3.5, raised

Beautifully written, with images that tease and snag dancing through, yet somehow, the feeling left for me is that the insubstantiality, almost like drifting mist, of something which I couldn’t quite grasp, felt unsatisfying.

Elsa, now in her mid thirties, a renowned and extraordinary concert pianist, had some kind of awful seizure of blankness, where all knowledge of the music in memory and muscle left her during a performance of a Rachmaninov’s Piano concerto No 2 in Vienna, and flees the stage.

There is some kind of mystery, an untold story in Elsa’s childhood. A child prodigy, she was ‘given’ to her renowned maestro for training into the extraordinary talent she became, by her foster parents.

Arthur Goldstein, her Maestro, is now very elderly, death approaching, and living in Italy. Elsa is somehow geographically drifting, in Athens at the start of the novel, where she sees someone she instinctively feels is her doppelganger.

The novel explores this shadowy search for, and relationship with ‘the other’ – that other which is someway is oneself, the missing, un-remembered part of one self, the self one might have been. This doppelganger is not seen as any kind of evil being, and part of what the novel ‘says’ might even be about the need to be more fully oneself, by acknowledging all one is.

There are encounters, with others, across Europe, where Elsa is now coaching other potential child prodigies, and is like some kind of transformative agent who enables her pupils to own their own fuller selves, identities not acceptable to their peers or families

Elsa’s search FOR, rather than flight from her doppelganger is conducted in a kind of playful, maybe taunting, mischievous spirit. The doppelganger, Elsa feels, has ‘stolen’ something from her which she thought was rightfully hers. Elsa retaliates by purloining some kind of playful exchange object the other woman mislays, throwing down almost some kind of energetic challenge

Something in the quality of the writing feels as if, perhaps deliberately, Levy refuses to allow the reader to fully identify with, or get close to Elsa. Maybe that’s the point? Do not lose yourself in the reading?

Inevitably (because Elsa dyes her hair blue) and because the quality of that Rachmaninov concerto is melancholy, blue, the other music which played in my head in the reading was Gershwin’s Rhapsody.

Music, also, cannot quite be grasped, that kind of music, often imbuing the reader with a kind of endless yearning for what cannot ever quite be grasped in substance

I confess that thinking about this book, struggling to record my response to it, left me more enamoured than I expected, its refusal to leave my mind

Found this novel quite a surprise. Surreal sections, especially the dreamlike sequences with her doppelganger, are usually off-putting to me, but I persevered and became more involved in the main character and her incomplete journey of her personal history. I think I might have liked more musical moments in the narrative, considering her profession, but the final section with her mentor was particularly absorbing, if not entirely resolved for me. An interesting and unusual book. Well worth the read.

August Blue follows Elsa, a famous pianist, after she walks out of a performance. Elsa travels across Europe for work, family and to bunker down during Covid.

The novel is an exploration of identity, family, patriarchy, love. I am hesitant to describe too much of the plot because the beauty of the novel is how it unfold, it drifts across countries, through dreams, memories, thoughts.

Levy excels at writing a warm, dreamy story with a wry wit. She writes without imposing a view or message on the reader, treating them as intelligent enough to read discerningly and with compassion.

August Blue is a nice story to meander through, flick through the pages, return to. I can’t wait to pick it up in hard copy.

There is also an excellent Guardian profile on Levy which might be of interest to fellow NetGalley users.

Pick up this book up if: you are a fan or Deborah Levy, classical music or want to read something clever, witty and a bit dreamy.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

There is a dream-like lyricism to the writing of Deborah Levy. I particularly loved her memoirs; the descriptions were heartfelt and appealing. All 3 of these were a joy to behold.

I found this novel akin to a black-and-white arthouse movie; not much happens, but because it's all so beautifully told, it doesn't matter; we're on a journey for the journey's sake and not the destination. Place is crucial to this novel, with all locations lovingly portrayed and metaphors of keys working or not, which might come across as contrived in the hands of a less assured author, are successfully woven into the narrative.

I struggled to see the point of the doppelganger and what this brought to the novel, but like the arthouse movie, I was left wondering rather than disappointed. I found the musical allusions relevant and added much to the narrative. All in all an intriguing novel, beautifully told.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC

This follows a pianist named Elsa as she's wandering around Europe kind of seeing a weird doubling person who is following her. It deals with interpersonal relationships between her and her piano coach who has become somewhat of a surrogate father to her. I found it interesting but I felt like a lot of it went over my head. . It didnt stick with me the way ",The Man Who Saw Everything", "Hot Milk " or "Swimming Home" did but it's still worth a read for people who are like myself avid fans of Levy's writing.