Obsessed With the Life That Could Have Been
In the early days of the pandemic, it became harder for us to see one another. The human face, the ultimate marker of individuality, what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called “the first disclosure,” was suddenly sheathed in fabric. Strangers encountered on the street were even stranger—and the masks that covered their visage became a screen on which to project anxious thoughts.
In August Blue, the South African–born, North London–based novelist Deborah Levy’s latest, a concert pianist named Elsa Anderson glimpses a woman in a blue hospital mask at a flea market in Athens buying a kitschy bauble—a pair of toy mechanical horses—which she inexplicably also badly wants for herself. Unable to fully view the woman’s face, Elsa comes to believe she is actually seeing in the mysterious, attractive stranger some version of herself, or rather, a doppelgänger of sorts. “My startling thought at the moment was that she and I were the same person.”
Levy’s readers would be surprised if she set a novel in the aftermath of the Great Lockdown of 2020, when “everyone looked dazed and battered,” even as the worst of the pandemic had passed. She has always used the defining events of recent times—the collapse of
