Deborah Levy’s Disorienting, Captivating Fiction

In her autobiographical essay Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013), the British novelist, playwright, and poet Deborah Levy reexamines a notebook she kept during a visit to Poland in 1988. On a train from Warsaw to Kraków, she observes a soldier saying goodbye to three women: his mother, his sister, and his girlfriend. He kisses his mother’s hand, his sister’s cheek, and his girlfriend’s lips. In her essay a quarter century later, Levy considers the political backdrop—Poland was in economic collapse and food prices were soaring, but the Solidarity-led strikes at shipyards had yet to spell doom for communism—and then she considers the soldier’s farewell. “It seems that what interests me,” Levy writes of her old notebook, “is the act of kissing in the middle of a political catastrophe.”

Levy’s eighth novel, , features plenty of kissing in the middle of political upheaval, and outside it,