When I was in London in October, I ran into Stefan Tobler of And Other Stories Press at a White Review reading. He put a book in my hand called Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy, and promised I would love it. It had a blurb from Jeanette Winterson on the back, an endorsement which even in these cynical times I take seriously. Unable to get to it right away, I put it aside and took it home to New York with me for the holidays, and finally had a chance to read it on a plane ride to Seattle just after the New Year.
I drank it down with the kind of concentration you can only attain on a long plane ride, where being anonymous and surrounded by strangers as you all breathe recycled air creates a kind of atemporal reality buffer, so you fall deeper into a book than you might have in the comfort of your own home. Very short-- pushing the boundaries of the novella-- Swimming Home depicts a group of English people who are enjoying a perfectly banal holiday in France until a naked girl called Kitty Finch shows up in their midst. She has a well-crafted story and, apparently, no place to go. The characters take her in, and allow her to stay in the bungalow they are renting.
Kitty’s a slippery character, the kind of slightly older girl who seems, to a young teenager (as indeed she seems to fourteen-year-old Nina), to be extraordinarily exotic, knowing, and wise, but who just as quickly can slip into extreme flakiness or outright lunacy. Predictably, she gets involved with Nina’s father, the renowned poet Joe Jacobs. It becomes clear that Kitty has gone there on purpose in order to show her poetry to Joe-- believing that he alone can understand it, and even more weirdly, claiming that only she can understand his.
But the point isn’t the plot, or Levy’s language, or the deliberate yet casual strokes drawn between the characters that delineate their relationships and needs. What Swimming Home points to is the insufficiencies and failures of language and storytelling to get across what we really mean: our urgencies, our worries, our fears. Laura, the close friend and holiday companion of Nina’s mother, Isabel, can’t understand why Isabel has allowed Kitty to remain on the premises.
Laura changed the subject and wanted to know if she thought Kitty Finch might be a little… she searched for the word… ‘touched’? The word stuck in her mouth and she wished she had another language to translate what she meant, because the only words stored inside her were from the school playground of her generation, a lexicon that in no particular order started with barmy, bonkers, barking, and went on to loopy, nuts, off with the fairies and then danced up the alphabet again to end with cuckoo.
We compose our own stories to understand the world, as Nina does to make sense of her parents’ relationship, only to find she has completely misjudged it, or as Joe does in order to minimize the effect Kitty has on him, typing her as a particular kind of person he has encountered many times before:
‘I can’t stand THE DEPRESSED. It’s like a job, it’s the only thing they work hard at. Oh good my depression is very well today. Oh good today I have another mysterious symptom and I will have another one tomorrow. THE DEPRESSED are full of hate and bile and when they are not having panic attacks they are writing poems.’
But try as he might, Kitty gets in. Funny, irreverent, and deeply unsettling, Swimming Home charts an unusual path through what might otherwise seem to be territory as familiar and knowable as a backyard swimming pool. But Levy’s storytelling method leaves much hinted at under the surface, unspecified and troubling.
I don't usually make a plug for publishers when I talk about their books, but I'll make an exception here. Recently, in The London Review of Books, Jenny Diski referred to And Other Stories as the future and best hope of publishing:
And Other Stories, the publisher of Deborah Levy’s novel, is a more interesting response to the commodification of writing. For £20 or £35 you can subscribe to two or all four of the new novels they will publish in the next year. You don’t choose the authors or the books; in fact, you don’t have any idea what they will be publishing. Stefan Tobler started And Other Stories in order to publish an international list of the kind of fiction, both translated and in the original English, which he believes is being rejected by mainstream corporations. The books or manuscripts are suggested by agents, interested members of the public, friends or colleagues, writers themselves; a shortlist is sent out for discussion to reading groups that have been set up around the world. Their thoughts are relayed back to an acquisitions meeting comprising what Tobler calls ‘the core team’, although people on the mailing list are welcome to attend. In the end, Tobler and his colleagues retain editorial choice, and are prepared, after broader consultation, to take a decision based on their own judgments. In much the same way as the old independent publishers.
Subscribers are welcome to participate in the process, but they aren’t putting their money on their favourite. They are staying curious and trusting Tobler and his small team to come up with four books that will engage and surprise them, even perhaps not please them, or maybe, as it was for me with Levy’s book, give them great satisfaction and a sense of relief that the book is there, handsomely designed and well produced, in the world for others to discover.
For more information, go to their website at www.andotherstories.org.
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