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Acclaimed author Deborah Levy, in a stirring collection of essays pays tribute to the feminine in general and some of the obscure as well as famous literary and artistic women, who have served as beacons of inspiration in ger own authorial endeavours. The Position of Spoons is a powerful homage to the indomitable spirit.
The first essay titled “Bathed in an Arc of French Light” sets the stage for the rest of the book. Expressing her unabashed admiration for French novelist, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, known monymously as Colette, Levy writes about the influence of Colette on her life from a very early age. “When I started to read her books, all that was transgressive and sensuous in her writing blew like a wind from Burgundy, Paris and the south of France into the damp suburban gardens of London”, writes Levy.
If Colette was the very epitome of transgression, Marguerite Duras worked magic by adhering to the principle of being economical with words. Miserly, yet magnanimous, Duras’s spare albeit revealing style of writing wove its own tapestry of influence on Levy. Terming Duras’s The Lover, a work of incandescence, Levy contending that the book is more existential in nature than feminist, expresses her doubts on the prospects of the same being published in the contemporaneous era. The Lover was penned in the year 1984.
On January 19, 1981, twenty-two-year-old Francesca Woodman jumped to her death from a loft window of a building on the East Side of New York. The teenager, as the world learned much later, had left behind an enduring legacy in the form of her haunting and almost metaphysical collection of black and white pictures, many of which featured herself. Levy in her emotional essay “Walking Out of The Frame”, pays tribute to both the persona and photographs of Francesca Woodman. Realising that Levy herself is clad in a pair of boots similar to that worn by Woodman in one of her pictures, Levy underscores the importance of ‘getting a grip’ while attempting to walk out of what she calls the frame of femininity, into something vaguer, and something more blurred.
The Position of Spoons also embeds within its confines an appreciable degree of interiority. Levy in a refreshingly transparent manner opens the doors to her own life by narrating experiences, both celebratory and sombre. In an eerily titled essay “A to Z Of The Death Drive”, Lecy relates each of the English alphabet with something to an automobile while describing the death of a famous persona in a road accident. The word C representing Camus (Albert Camus) and Cochran (Eddie Cochran) for example, concentrates on the accidents leading to the demise of both Cochran and Camus. The alphabet D as an ode to James Dean has this meagre assemblage of words, “Kenneth Anger owns a mangled piece of Dean’s cursed Porsche Spyder bought for $300.”
The Position of Spoons is ambivalent yet lucid, concealing yet transparent. This collection of essays, more than anything else, is a testimony to the prowess of Deborah Levy as a formidable author.
The Position of Spoons is published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and will be available on sale from Oct 01, 2024.
Thank You Net Galley for the Advance Reviewer Copy!