Present: Adrienne, Barbara, Betsy, Denise, Julie, Mariannick, Murielle, Pat, Rosie and her visiting friend Kirsty, Wendy
The book is presented by Murielle.
Murielle began by giving us some biographical details. Deborah Levy was born in Johannesburg, South Africa on August, 6th 1959. Her grandparents were Lithuanian Jewish immigrants on her father’s side and upper-
middle-class "English colonials" on her mother’s side. Her parents had to move to the UK in 1968 when she was 9. (Her father was a member of African National Congress and had been in prison for 4 years). Deborah Levy started by writing theatre plays, short stories and many novels. She also wrote two books on Freud. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination and has been a finalist for the Man Booker Prize several times. Deborah Levy worked on Swimming Home for five years and had trouble finding a publisher at first. Anotherstories was clever enough to publish it. It was first longlisted for the Man Booker Prize then went on to be shortlisted.
Murielle then gave a brief plot summary. The novel takes place in the south of France, in a villa on the Riviera during the summer. Barbara said that the novel reminded her of a play. It would be perfect as a play, since, in her view, the characters didn’t have depth. Actors could fill them out. Also the action takes place over a short period of time and one place. An English poet, Joe Jacobs, is on holiday with his wife, Isabel, a war correspondent journalist, their daughter, Nina, aged 14, and a couple of Isabel’s friends, Laura and Mitchell from London. A young woman arrives quite unexpectedly and everything and everyone is shaken up. What seems to be an ideal setting – a villa with a swimming pool on the riviera, in the south of France, in summer – turns out to be quite disturbing and unsettling. We talked about whether a pool could be included in a theatrical setting, and indeed one person remembered going to a performance of The Tempest where there was a pool.
The timeline of the novel begins on a Saturday in July when the members of the group around the swimming-pool discover “a body” which turns out to be “a woman swimming naked under the water,” motionless “like a starfish” (6).
The woman is young. We learn that her name is Kitty Finch, that she is a botanist and a poet, that she stammers, often takes her clothes off and stays naked, which is quite unusual. Joe’s wife Isabel invites Kitty to stay but in a strange way: “Isabel (…) was actually placing the wooden chair between her recliner and her husband’s. Kitty Finch glanced nervously at Isabel and then at Joe, as if she couldn’t work out if she was being offered the chair or being forced to sit in it” (10). Is Kitty a threat or a victim? Wendy pointed out that her name, Kitty Finch, suggests that she is both predator (cat) and prey (bird). All of the characters have ambivalent facets.
In Murielle’s view, the novel is about the relationships within Joe’s family and human relationships in general with the other people around. It is also about human frailty, identity, origins, mental health, despair and what people call “home.” The reader is the witness of these interactions, of this drama, but Murielle found the story to be told in such a style that is somehow not dark or troublesome, often with humorous remarks. However, Murielle found it hard to feel close to any of the characters and other readers agreed.
Concerning the novel’s structure, Murielle pointed out that it is divided into the seven days of a week, starting on a Saturday in July 1994. And it is also built in a circle, as the opening scene (extracted from the final day of that week as Kitty and Joe drive on the mountain road at midnight) is retold (with slight variations) in the end. At that point the reader knows much more about the characters and may look at the scene differently. One sentence is the same though : “Yes, she said. ‘Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely’” (4). But on page 146, Kitty adds : “But you tried and you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all. That is why I am here, Jozef. I have come to France to save you from your thoughts.” Wendy wondered whether Kitty was trying to save Joe or to destroy him. We are led to believe (thanks to Nina’s interpretation) that Kitty is the one who plans suicide. Nina first thinks that the body we see at the end is Kitty; however, it’s Joe (who we learn has also considered suicide at various times in his life). Betsy sees his death as a way to save himself. Kitty seems to be an almost mythical figure, a guide. Her role is to take Joe to a certain point. There is a kind of mirror or double relationship between the two characters. Kitty is obsessed. She says that Joe is inside her. She is a kind of agent provocateur —the disturbing agent who provides the conflict in the plot.
“Swimming home” is the name of the poem written by Kitty. She arrives at the villa with the intention of showing her poem to Joe Jacobs because she admires him and has read all his books. Kirsty thought that “Swimming Home” was also the name of a short story by John Cheever. In fact the title is “The Swimmer,” and it’s about a man who returns from a party by swimming though each of the neighbours’ pools. It’s very possible that Levy had that in mind. She may also have been inspired by the film, La Piscine, by Jacques Deray (1969), which also deals with the arrival of a young, sexy girl but the difference from Levy’s novel is that there is no jealousy from the wife. The novel stages the implosion of an upper-crust holiday group.
The swimming-pool plays a central part in the novel. It is like a matrix. It is the beginning and the end of all things. It’s like a womb (watery), but also like a grave (carved out of stone). It’s a signal that something is off: “The swimming-pool in the grounds of the tourist villa was more like a pond than the languid blue pools in holiday brochures” (5). It is murky, like the motives for the characters. Straightforward remarks are often humorous or absurd: “Madeleine Sheridan’s house, which was called Maison Rose even though it was painted blue” (154).
Concerning the novel’s setting, Julie was annoyed about the way Levy treated Provence. She put this novel in the category of clichéd representations of the South of France with their evocations of lavender, quaint locals, and the smell of baguettes. She was surprised by how short it was. Reading it in Kindle, she was shocked when it ended. It felt like a short story stretched to a novel. On top of that the characters annoyed her. Murielle liked this short novel, but felt uneasy about the characters, in particular, Joe who she felt behaved like a proper jerk. Coming back to the question of whether Levy knew the Côte d’Azur, Wendy said that two things bothered her. First the fact that Mitchell was shooting off his gun, hunting rabbits and other small animals, in July, when hunting is strictly forbidden. She was sure that in France neighbours would be calling the gendarmes about such behaviour. And we wondered how Mitchell had managed to smuggle the guns into the country (although it was before 9/11 and airport crackdowns). And why were the police relatively easy on Mitchell when he had guns without permits? The other thing that bothered Wendy was the sugar mice purportedly on sale in a French market. She has never seen them for sale in France, although they are a treat for British children. Most of the American members had never heard of sugar mice. A Google search shows that you’d have to order them from Britain to get hold of them in France. Mariannick wasn’t convinced about the assignation at the Hotel Negresco, nor about the distances the characters walked in Nice. So the group agreed that Levy is no expert on France. Does it matter? Well, it irked some people, especially Julie, who used to live in Vence.
We then prolonged the discussion of the characters. Murielle asked whether or how Levy succeeds in giving them life. She felt that as we get more information on the characters’ past, things get clearer. Some characters are sketched in a few strokes. There’s the bartender Claude who looks like Mick Jagger, and Jurgen, the caretaker of the house (“if you can call a lazy stoned bastard like Jurgen a caretaker” page 9), who not so secretly loves Kitty. There’s the neighbour, Madeleine Sheridan, the old lady who keeps spying on the villa from her balcony. She describes herself as a toad and feels she is invisible. We discussed the “invisibility” of women over 50. As a watcher and commentator Madeleine plays the role of chorus.
We are told that Kitty knows all about the poet’s past because he has written poems about it (“he knew she had read him because he had told his readers all about his teenage years on medication” page 21). And she herself has been on antidepressant medication for years (21). We learn that Kitty has stayed in the villa before (“She explained that the pool now had underwater lightning. It didn’t last year.” p. 35). Kitty’s mother worked for the owner of the villa : “She used to clean the villa for Rita Dwighter. That’s how I get to stay free sometimes’.” (128). Joe’s mother cleaned houses too, so these details strengthen the mirroring relationship between the two.
Kitty is an intriguing character. In some ways she has an uncanny understanding. Nina feels: “It was as if Kitty had read her thoughts” (34). Kitty is described in an arresting metaphor: “Standing next to Kitty Finch was like being near a cork that had just popped out of a bottle. The first pop when gasses seem to escape and everything is sprinkled for one second with something intoxicating” (36). Is she his disciple? Is Joe a father figure? Is Kitty a stalker? Wendy wondered what it is about poets and the people who latch onto them, their literary groupies. Julie confirmed that this is a thing. In fact she even had a stalker who followed her to a conference. Is Joe allowed to die because Kitty will be a great writer as he promises? The relationship between the two is puzzling and at the end we are left with questions. Wendy said she likes novels that finish by remaining mysterious.
We talked about the relationship between Joe and Isabel. Joe wants to be loved, which is why he can’t resist Kitty and he reflects on how he had betrayed his wife “so often” (64). Isabel keeps her distance, going away for long periods of time. Does she plan to leave him, as Madeleine believes? At the end she thinks that she would like him to drench her with love like falling rain. Both of them seem bound to one another by desire and distance. For Joe writing is a way to attain this. His words “were his weapons to silence his wife and keep her in his life, to keep his family intact, flawed and hostile but still a family” (66). So Isabel “was a kind of ghost in her London home (…). She learned that she too had a transient place in the family home” (32).
We talked about the lack of physical description of the characters. For example, we have Joe’s age and his hair colour. Adrienne mentioned that we know he is well-built from a comment by Mitchell. Wendy felt that physical description is relatively unimportant because rather than learning how characters look, we know how they see things. The novel shifts point of view, so that we get inside all of the characters minds and get to know them that way.
At the end, we get to know more about Joe’s past. Isabel tells how “Her husband was five years old when he was smuggled into Britain in 1942 , half starved and with forged documents. Three days after he arrived his mother and father were deported along with his two-year-old sister to the Chelmno death camp in western Poland” (153). We understand that Joe was pushed into the woods by his father to save him from the Nazis. He can never go home because his family has died in the Holocaust. Once we know this, it makes sense that he wears a suit on his sister’s birthday. It’s a sign of respect for the dead. Joe’s history of depression can certainly be linked to his childhood bereavement. People with trauma struggle with their own identity. Betsy thought that neither Joe nor Isabel can trust anyone. Isabel suffers trauma from her experience as a war correspondent.
Murielle felt that identity is a major theme in the novel. Identity begins with the different names some characters have due to life circumstances. Katherine Finch is Kitty and Kitty Ket. Joe is the one whose identity is most problematic. He is “Jozef Nowogrodzki in his passport. Joe Harold Jacobs on all other ID (…) Her husband had many other names : JHJ, Joe, Jozef, the famous poet, the British poet, the arsehole poet, the Jewish poet, the atheist poet, the modernist poet, the post-Holocaust poet, the philandering poet” (152). Wendy wondered whether, like Joe, Levy could be called a post-Holocaust writer. Her father’s family fled from Nazi persecution. We talked about how historical trauma can be passed through generations.
The novel’s final chapter is about Nina Jacobs, London 2011, now an adult. She is having a silent conversation with her father, recalling the past. Rosie felt that Joe has betrayed his daughter, abandoning her as his own parents abandoned him. Rosie was unhappy about that. When we see Nina as an adult we know that she has survived in a way. She has a family and cares for her daughter. Barbara said that Nina is the only one she could identify with. She’s the only normal one. She’s the only one with depth.
Barara wondered whether there is a moral to the book. We agreed that it’s not that kind of book. It asks questions, creates mystery. It holds together through images rather than plot. For example there are lots of animal images, like the bear mentioned at the start and at the end, or the rabbits or the mice.
To wrap up the discussion Wendy announced that Katharine Claringbull was having surgery on her ankle on the day of the Book Club meeting. She kindly sent her comments on the novel, so Wendy read them to the group. They are included below.
Katharine: Did I find it entertaining? No, I found it unsettling and disquieting, but as a reader it made me work hard. There is an intensity to the writing, and the vivid descriptions of a relaxed (ha!) vacation in the beautiful environment of the South of France are a contrast to the chilliness of all the characters. Plus, there's the feeling of menace hanging over this group, so I wondered where the menace (and undoubtedly a dead body) would come from all the way through my reading - fortunately, the book was brief.
The book lacked warmth, a contrast by design of the author presumably, given it was set in the sunny Riviera. I found it impossible to like any of the characters or to feel empathy - even with Josef/Joe and his Holocaust background (as of 1994, the book's setting, he was in his mid-fifties). Plus, he was a wealthy poet (really? how many of those are there if they write poetry exclusively? And he's sought after by young female fans and is a philanderer, this is known by his wife.
The murky pool was the metaphor for everyone's murky secrets.
On completion of the book I went back to the beginning and re-read the Introduction and the opening chapter, which was helpful to a better understanding. Plus, after Kitty and Joe's discreet but short encounter in the Hotel Negresco, all he wants is to go home to his wife and daughter. And one knows, as a reader, that's not going to work out too well: "To have been so intimate with Kitty Finch had been a pleasure, a pain, a shock, an experiment, but most of all it had been a mistake. He asked her again to please, please, please drive him safely home to his wife and daughter.
"Yes" she (Kitty) said "Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely". That he didn't get "home" safely was the set-up from the first few sentences of the book.
The introduction to the book noted that the author had read Deleuze and Lacan, and I had to look them up, to find out that they are two of the most influential French thinkers of the twentieth century. (I may decide to educate myself on these two guys while I'm recovering over the next few weeks, although a surf down internet rabbit holes isn't encouraging on that score). Maybe that lack of knowledge is why I felt out of my depth in reading Levy's book.
Katharine’s Conclusion: unpleasant characters in a world depicted as pleasant. But this is mitigated by the beauty of the language deployed by the author. She is a visual and poetic writer - e.g. a meadow full of thistles, or "the pool more like a pond than the languid blue pools in the holiday brochures".
I didn't love it: books give me endless enjoyment, especially when there is redemption at their conclusion, but there was no redemption here.
The (subversive) neighbour Dr Madeleine didn't tolerate Kitty and would have sent her packing. I would too. Would you?
