2023-06-26 11:01:59
Spoon Position
of Deborah Levy
Translated from English by Nathalie Azoulai
Sous-sol, 208 p., 18,5 €
Deborah Levy was seventeen when she bought her first pair of creepers. It was at Shellys, “London’s trendiest shoe store”. Four decades later, the English author has not forgotten the insolent confidence in existence that gave her these five centimeters of black crepe soles embellished with a V-shaped tongue. Their mere mention is enough for her sentences to get carried away. “My creepers were beauty, truth and genius personified (…), she tells us. They were the Capital, my ticket to leave the suburbs. » Once again swollen with her youthful certainties, here she treads the macadam of the dormitory suburbs as before and propels herself towards the future. “There is something about the form of creepers that seems to give perspective to the world, she continues. Their black, pointed tips beat to the rhythm of my rebellion. »
Finding the essential in the insignificant
This is just one example of Deborah Levy’s brilliant way of finding the essential in the insignificant. Spoon Positiona collection of around thirty short texts on subjects as varied as “the very uncivil desire for death that simmers deep inside us” or Marguerite Duras’ relationship with language, has many other celebrations of the mysterious power of objects. There are also eggs, these “works of art made in the body of a hen” who, being “the most beautiful” inside, deserve the center of the table rather than the fridge. Objects with which we maintain a relationship lurking in our most secret corners, and it is all the art of Deborah Levy to open up to them.
In the first person, she brings us without theatricality into her intimate sediments. More often than not, we don’t expect it. Like when she summons the memory of her downstairs neighbor, when she was 26, Mr John, with whom she discusses Freud one day “who lamented not being able to ‘believe in God who wants to be praised all the time'”. “But it’s so good to be praised, your Mr. John. Perhaps Nietzsche envied him. » And the Deborah Levy of the time concludes: “I had no doubts. Mr John was indeed a philosopher of the first order. » A revelation that will sanctify all their future exchanges, including, she tells us in comic contrast, when he explains to her “that an egg should be boiled for four and not five minutes and that, on the plate, the teaspoon should point towards the egg and not away from it. » This position of the spoon gives its title to the collection as a facetious claim of prosaism. It hides a depth that weaves its way gracefully through these incessant passages from cock to donkey defying all hierarchy.
Sassy and free, Deborah Levy never overlooks us, including on the most advanced subjects. “Elizabeth Hardwick (…) renews our look at this strange and brilliant novel”she says about this American literary criticism and her analysis of Stormwind Heights. There is not “she” and “them”, but only one “us”, embarked on the same boat of questions, on the meeting of the infinitely small and the infinitely large.
#grace #donkey