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Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography
Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography | Deborah Levy
9 posts | 2 read | 5 to read
From the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Swimming Home, a single volume comprising her first two novels: Beautiful Mutants, long out of print, and Swallowing Geography, never before published in the United States. Beautiful Mutants, Deborah Levy's surreal first novel, introduces a manipulative and magical Russian exile who summons forth a series of grotesques--among them the Poet, the Banker, and the Anorexic Anarchist. Levy explores the anxieties that pervaded the 1980s: exile and emigration, broken dreams, crazed greed and the first seeds of the global financial crisis, self-destructive desires, and the disintegration of culture. It is a feverish allegory written in prose so beautiful and acrobatic that it could only come from a poet. This remarkable and pioneering debut is as much about language as it is the world that ensnares and alienates us. In Swallowing Geography, J. K., like her namesake Jack Kerouac, is always on the road, traveling Europe with her typewriter in a pillowcase. She wanders, meeting friends and strangers, battling her raging mother, and taking in the world through her uniquely irreverent, ironic perspective. Levy blends fairytale with biting satire, pushing at the edges of reality and marveling at where the world collapses in on itself. In this stunningly original novel, Deborah Levy searches deep into the heart of the late-twentieth century and does not hold back on what she finds there.
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quote
Lindy
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When The Poet throws back her head and roars with laughter, my cat stares into her mouth with wonder.

LeahBergen Pretty face! 6y
sherri Those eyes! 6y
Lindy @Sherri She was staring at me because it was dinner time and I was taking her picture instead of feeding her. 😏 6y
sherri Worth it. Lol! 6y
50 likes5 comments
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Lindy
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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?

review
Lindy
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Pickpick

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.

arubabookwoman I love your illustration? Do you know who the artist is. 6y
Lindy @arubabookwoman It‘s from the cover of the Bloomsbury edition that I have out from the library, cropped to cut out the library barcode. There‘s no information about the cover art, unfortunately. 6y
CarolynM I loved Hot Milk. Stacked 6y
Lindy @CarolynM These are more experimental than Hot Milk, yet I liked seeing the seeds of her later work. 6y
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Lindy
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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)

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Lindy
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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.”

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Lindy
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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. 👇

Lindy Quote continues… That leaves March, June, September, October, December for other stuff to happen. (edited) 6y
TrishB 😂😂 6y
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Lindy
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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.

lahousewyfe OMG. This feels like me. 6y
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review
shawnmooney
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Bailedbailed

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.

LeahBergen 😂😂 6y
30 likes1 comment
blurb
shawnmooney
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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!

mauveandrosysky Ooh, I so want to read more of her now! 8y
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