Mia Levitin

Mia Levitin is a cultural and literary critic. She is the author of The Future of Seduction.

Thursday

Mia Levitin

A hazardous crossing: The Man Who Saw Everything, by Deborah Levy, reviewed

Serious readers and serious writers have a contract with each other,’ Deborah Levy once wrote. ‘We live through the same historical events, and the same Pepsi ads. Writers and readers, nervously sharing this all too fluid world, circle each other to find out what the hell is going on.’ Figuring out what the hell is going on within the fluid worlds of Levy’s fiction is not always straightforward. While other authors are increasingly drawn to autofiction, for Levy, uncertain times, it seems, call for uncertain realities. The characters in The Man Who Saw Everything shape-shift, and time bends back and then twists upon itself again.

Thursday

Mia Levitin

Sex and the married woman

The epigraph of Three Women comes from Baudelaire’s ‘Windows’: ‘What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane.’ Inspired by Gay Talese’s 1980 reportage on the sexual revolution, Thy Neighbour’s Wife, Lisa Taddeo, a journalist and Pushcart prize-winning short story writer, peered into the windows of three ‘ordinary’ American women to illustrate their ‘erotic lives and longings’.

Thursday

Mia Levitin

A spiral of deceit

The Hebrew word for ‘truth’ - see above left  (emet) is comprised of the first, middle and last letters of the alphabet. Truth, scholars say, pervades all things. Talmudists add that the aleph, mem and tav that form emet are balanced, grounded characters, while the letters that make up the word for‘lie’ – see above right (sheker), teeter precariously on the page. In our post-truth era of Pinocchian politicians and social media spewing falsehoods, however, it may well be truth that sits on shakier ground. Like Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s previous novel Waking Lions, Liar considers the consequences of a moment of misjudgment that unfolds as if fated.