August Blue

Starred review from April 3, 2023
Levy follows up The Man Who Saw Everything with another magnificent experiment in surrealism, this time with the story of a 34-year-old Londoner who encounters her double. Elsa Anderson, a famous pianist whose star is on the wane after a disastrous Rachmaninov performance, is sight-seeing in Athens when she notices a woman wearing a green raincoat that’s similar to hers. Later, while Elsa is with a piano student, the double’s voice emerges in Elsa’s thoughts, claiming that Elsa is running away from her life. Elsa was orphaned by her mother as a newborn and adopted at five by an influential music teacher. All her life, Elsa has put off reading the adoption papers, preferring instead to channel the mysteries and sadness of her origins into her playing. Levy slowly and skillfully teases out the implications of Elsa’s disconnection from herself, which become apparent in a series of striking scenes. While waiting in a London station for a train to Paris, Elsa is surprised to be recognized by a fan, a woman who was “convinced she knew who I was, but I did not know who I was.” In Paris and beyond, the voice of Elsa’s double continues to return. Levy’s sensual descriptions make the conceit come to life (“Her voice inside me. Like a handful of small stones thrown at a window”), and when the two women finally meet, their exchange leads Elsa to a most illuminating revelation. This is a stunner.

April 1, 2023
Does the onstage crisis afflicting a famous musician denote an end or a beginning? Celebrated 34-year-old concert pianist Elsa M. Anderson has "a double following [her] around the world." First glimpsed in Athens buying toy horses, then in London, then Paris, the nameless woman seems to be in dialogue with Elsa, inside her head. Elsa has also stolen the doppelg�nger's hat. This first enigmatic note is soon joined by others, echoing and overlapping through the new novel by esteemed British writer Levy, which has introduced Elsa at a point of professional upheaval. Midway through her most recent concert, playing Rachmaninov in Vienna, she messed up and walked off the stage. Now, choosing to give music lessons to teenagers, Elsa spends time on a Greek island, then in Paris, returns home to London, and eventually travels to Sardinia, to the home of her adopted father, Arthur Goldstein, who may be dying. Elsa, who feels herself to be porous, unraveling, has a complicated heritage. Referred to as Ann, she was the ward of foster parents till age 6, then was "gifted" to Goldstein, who took the infant prodigy into his care and tutelage and renamed her. Now an adult, but with "no lovers. No children," she is preoccupied by thoughts of suicide and increasingly of her mother. Slowly, while invoking a welter of European cultural icons, Levy pulls tighter her characteristic threads of identity, perspective, and parenting, intensifying Elsa's experiences with friends, music, and various abusive men while constantly questioning herself: "Maybe I am." Who is she really, what is the significance of the toy horses and of her blue hair are among the many questions in this short, teasing novel, which enlarges the possibility of answers when Elsa and her double meet at last, back in Paris. An economical, elliptical, but always entertaining novel of transformation by a highly skilled enigmatist.

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May 1, 2023

Shortly before she flamed out in Vienna while performing Rachmaninoff, concert pianist Elsa M. Anderson dyed her hair a shocking blue. At the time of this fiasco, Elsa was an international star with countless recordings to her name. Now with her stalled career, her fading blue hair, and a mystery woman popping up in various places, she traipses around Europe, picking up occasional gigs teaching music to talented youngsters. A former child prodigy herself, Elsa was adopted at the age of six by Arthur Goldstein, a renowned maestro who recognized her talent and nurtured it by somewhat tyrannical methods. With the pandemic still hovering, she has resisted any attempt to visit him in Sardinia. A question of identity has haunted Elsa all her life, but it isn't until she learns Arthur may be dying that she flies off to see him and to finally confront her past. VERDICT Twice nominated for the Booker Prize and admired for her inventive fiction, Levy (Real Estate; The Man Who Saw Everything) typically writes challenging books that appeal to fans of the work of Rachel Cusk and Ali Smith. Her latest, a more conventional novel, is well told and affecting.--Barbara Love

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