Deborah Levy’s slim novella is in a genre of its own. A charming tale of an unstable girl who is anorexic and a self-styled botanist currently obsessed with a famous poet, the unconventional storyline takes you up and down, and in and out of the lives of a family vacationing in a rental home with a pool out of which said unstable girl emerges frequently without any clothes on.
And if that piques one’s interest, there’s a lot more complexity to the story, because it may take the length of the rest of the story to understand that the author is adding layers of complication to get at something darker and more substantial: mental illness of the variety that can infect the relatively healthy, as well as the mysteries of marriage and family life. Also, along the way, there’s glimpses of the insecurities of youth and the indignities of age.
One is tempted to hurry up and rush to the end, but it’s best to take one’s time to get through it because many of its important events occur in the spaces between chapters and in the recesses of our imagination while we transition from one character to the other.
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