Beautiful Mutants, Deborah Levy's feverish allegory of a first novel,
introduces a manipulative and magical Russian exile who summons forth a
series of grotesques--among them the Poet, the Banker, and the Anorexic
Anarchist. Levy explores the anxieties that pervaded the 1980s: exile
and emigration, broken dreams, crazed greed and the first seeds of the
global financial crisis, self-destructive desires, and the
disintegration of culture.
In Swallowing Geography, J. K., like her namesake Jack Kerouac, is
always on the road, traveling Europe with her typewriter in a
pillowcase. She wanders, meeting friends and strangers, battling her
raging mother, and taking in the world through her uniquely irreverent,
ironic perspective. Levy blends fairytale with biting satire, pushing at
the edges of reality and marveling at where the world collapses in on
itself.
In The Unloved, a group of hedonistic tourists--from Algeria, England,
Poland, Germany, Italy, France, and America--gathers to celebrate the
holidays in a remote French château. Then a woman is brutally murdered,
and the sad, eerie child Tatiana declares she knows who did it. The
subsequent inquiry into the death, however, proves to be more of an
investigation into the nature of identity, love, insatiable rage, and
sadistic desire.
