Review: 4 stars
I love browsing bookstores, especially with my sisters. On a trip to Toronto last fall, my older sister shared some of her favourite reads with me as we were perusing the stacks at Type Books on Queen. The one that got me intrigued was ‘Hot Milk’ by Deborah Levy. Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker, the novel follows Sofia and her mother Rose, on their Hail Mary journey to Almería, Spain for a cure for Rose’s mysterious limb paralysis.
In the opening pages, we learn that 25-year old Sofia is being inducted into adulthood, awash in the jarring taste of one’s first major failure. “The dream is over for me. It began when I left my lame mother alone to pick the pears from the tree in our East London garden that autumn I packed my bags for university…It ended when she became ill and I abandoned my Ph.D.” Over the course of the novel, we see Sofia become the foil to her previous self as she wades into new shapes and forms of being. She changes her occupation from ‘Waitress’ to ‘Monster’ on a health intake form over subsequent visits to a seaside first-aid hut. The stifling heat, incessant jellyfish stings and her pent up madness and desire have swirled into a combustible being. Sofia has emerged anew. She triumphantly frees a murderous dog from an abusive owner, takes a first aid student to be a lover and then takes Ingrid, a seamstress and her muse, also as a lover.
The irresistible tide of the Andalusian pilgrimage sucks Sofia in and upends the predictable prison she has created in her mind and the physical constraints of being her mother’s legs. At one point, Rose considers amputation to rid herself of the limbs that fail her. In actuality, her limbs are already severed from her, yet tethered to her - Sofia is her only source of mobility. A daughter as an extension, yet separation of one’s own self. As the novel reaches its conclusion, the severance becomes permanent - mother and daughter are more estranged than ever. One living an ever smaller, shorter, boxed-in life, and the other bursting with possibility, melted by the hot Spanish sun into something malleable, finding its organic shape day by day.
The writing is gorgeous, experimental and bold. Passages read like poetry, and Levy plays with form throughout - bulleted lists punctuate chapters, as do grammar-defying lines such as “I was flesh thirst desire dust blood lips cracking feet blistered knees skinned hips bruised”. Just like hot milk, the writing froths over the reader, with only a pale residue remaining long past the last page, a stubborn mark that refuses to be forgotten. A searing, complex and enthralling read.