Written by Deborah Levy

I felt like I were reading poetry as much as magical prose, the way Levy uses imagines and metaphors that dance and sing in the moment and then recur in the book to be paired with something giving both images greater significance.

A famous piano virtuoso, Elsa M. Anderson, walks off the stage in Vienna in the middle of a performance of Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No.2. So begins Elsa’s wanderings across Europe, and her search to get to the bottom of her melancholy. “It is so abject to express the loneliness within me. I am not sure I can take the freedom to find the language in music to reveal it. I have, after all, learned to conceal it.”

Our hero in her soul searching is shadowed by a psychic double, or doppelganger, who not only looks a lot like Elsa, but wants the same things that Elsa does. Does she represent Elsa’s lost mother? “I realized I did not know what my mother looked like. The same could be said for my double. I had gazed at her, chased after her, but I did not have a sharp visual of her face.” “Perhaps. . . I was playing to get closer to the parent I never knew,” she says.

Meanwhile, the isolating elements of Covid and the lock down hang over the narrative throughout, further implicating the sense of loneliness that Elsa feels.

This is a beautiful book, written with fresh, sparkling and exquisite prose that draws you in and makes you want to remember each and every line. Levy is able to create a scene with a bare minimum of words, and the white spaces between sections seem to speak, too. It is like remembering the taste of that fresh-picked zucchini from the garden, but only in memory, only after it is gone, the fruit consumed. Our mothers are that zucchini.