The Position of Spoons and other intimacies, Deborah Levy
The Position of Spoons and other intimacies is a collection of essays, stories, and short texts. Some adhere to the fragmented writing style, while others conform to a long-form text, projecting a fluidity that fits to various categories of writing styles. The writing pieces sprout from the minuscule detailing of something ordinary like lemons, shoes, or an author's work. It is as if Levy is providing a testament to a writer's mind, any writer's mind, who tends to think over the minute, broader, bizarre, or odd things happening around them – anything that sets that string of thoughts free. A writer spools each idea out like a ball of yarn, writing them down in quiet hours of the night. This collection possesses the same erratic energy of a random thought placed in a notebook.
Levy’s writing is never without potential. She understands the reader’s psychology, so reading her musings is like going through an episode of psychoanalysis only to come out better. In this latest collection, no matter how her intimate thoughts spark from smaller things, they leave you asking for more. Not every piece will resonate with all readers, perhaps because of the nature and length of these pieces or the simple fact that every intimate writing is not for every person to read and agree with. Isn't that why some of us guard our notebooks with life?
My favourites, though, were ‘The Psychopathology of a Writing Life’, in which she decodes the mind of a writer and writes, “How we gaze at the world and how we negotiate the way it gazes back at us is the core of all writing”, ‘Too Much Past’ in which she questions the sustenance of the past through narratives of Maria Stepanova’s In Memory Of Memory and Chekhov’s story Three Sisters, and the essay she wrote as an introduction for Simone De Beauvoir’s book, The Inseparables. Her beautiful sentences and wit are sprinkled all over the book and, although this might not be her best work, reading this collection feels like you are in Levy’s insightful company.
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