Deborah Levy - Things I Don´t Want to Know

´When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense´.

My human and literary maturity - I know I made a mistake separating them, but sometimes they are just growing up separately, with no intention of meeting each other - grew since I´ve first read Deborah Levy. Since then, I´ve followed her writings and her literary interventions, but never felt strong enough to put my thoughts on my e-paper generously provided by my blogging playground.

Things I Don´t Want To Know is aimed to be an answer to Orwell´s On Writing. It is not a reply or a proper refutation, just a personal account based on his expectations. Any expectations are delusional hence one may not expect a structural refutation. Because writing, personal account, women personal accounts, indeed cannot be coherent and following a classical structure of the prose. 

From a word written on napkins - ENGLAND - to discussion with strangers answering their curiosity if she´s a writer, a pretexte for recollecting memories of Englad and her South African upbringing, of her relatives and the prison times of her father due to his opposition to apartheid. While in Mallorca, she is in the footsteps of other writers, George Sand who used to spend time there with Chopin. 

Identities are pieces of her. References, adding up, inspiring, but not necessarily important. They may or may not collide with the what is called the right patway of memory. Nevertheless, the memory is writing its own stories, struggling between ´I want´ and ´I don´t want´ to know. 

The prose of Deborah Levy is cryptic, self-referential and hard to decypher if lacking the identity  context, but there is beauty in the unknown and inspiration in the difference. It took me a long time to return to this writer, but it feels qualitatively different. Reading itself is also a quite personal personal subjective experience.

Rating: 4 stars