Swimming Home - Deborah Levy

"Swimming Home' is a subversive page-turner, a merciless gaze at the insidious harm that depression can have on apparently stable, well-turned-out people. Set in a summer villa, the story is tautly structured, taking place over a week in which a group of beautiful, flawed tourists in the French Riviera come loose at the seams. Shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize."

Deborah Levy is an interesting writer. There is a visual quality to her work that makes the reader blink. Is this a novel, or is it a film, we ask ourselves? Are we reading or watching? We become immobile in front of the screen of her set pieces, watching passively as the events happen before our eyes, as if in a documentary or a piece of reality TV. But there is no voice over, hardly any backstory, and no linking of scenes. What we see is all there is so we have to make of it what we can.
I really wanted to love this book, and I did love Levy's writing, her prose is masterful - conveying character, setting, and insight in small spare beautifully crafted paragraphs. The entire book is quite lean -- a week of time, briefly, surgically told . Levy's craftsmanship is rich. I thought the bluntness of the language matched well with the theme which predominated for me: the workings of fractured minds. There’s an absence of pronouns like ‘whom’ and ‘which’ and ‘that’ which make some of the sentences read as if there were an invisible twist in the middle but when you go back and reread them, you can’t find where the disjunction lies. It is as if, although it is a third person narrative, the writing itself is the product of a splintered mind. This did lead however, to the story being remarkably difficult to follow in places as it isn't incredibly clear what is going on. 

The problem is that the book is cold at the core. The oddly comforting epilogue rings false in a book that so limpidly depicts layer upon layer of rejection, failure to connect, and selfishness. The overwhelming urge that you have as a reader is to slap everyone concerned as they solipsistically labour at their own undoing. 

I assume this book was supposed to be a heart wrenching piece about depression and family detachment, but I was left feeling that is was more about human apathy and selfishness. I didn't feel anything in the end, maybe that was the point. To show you where as apathetic as them. Either way it didn't really work for me. 

Age Rating +15. Adult themes, disconcerting writing, swearing and suicide.