It was such a pleasure to read August Blue early. This was my first Deborah Levy and I look forward to reading through her backlist, which I've long neglected. I devoured this book over the course of a weekend, but it also would benefit a slower, closer reading.

In August Blue, we meet our blue-haired narrator Elsa, who is an accomplished concert pianist suffering from a career setback. Rather than hiding away, Elsa spends a summer traveling around Europe and teaching teenagers piano, though the latter is really a minor plot point of the story. All the while, with the backdrop of the COVID pandemic in 2021, she grapples with her own mental health and the story of her upbringing.

One of the most fascinating parts of the book is Elsa's relationship, if it can even be called that, with her doppelgänger. She meets this young woman at a market in Athens, and quickly becomes obsessed with her. She continues to encounter her, both in real life (maybe?) and in her mind, where she uses her to talk through some of her inner conflicts. Whether or not this woman is real, she serves as a foil for Elsa as she grapples with her past.

August Blue felt like a combination of a Rachel Cusk and an Ali Smith novel. On the one hand, we get philosophical conversations between our narrator and her friends and acquaintances. On the other, August Blue is full of little Easter eggs that help to flesh out the themes of the story. While not explicitly, Levy encourages her reader to think about the references she places throughout the story and how they relate to the journey the characters are going on.

Overall, I loved this book. This is a book that demands a close read, exploring all of Levy's references and thinking more fully about her themes. At the same time, Levy gives us interesting characters and situations that I will definitely not forget.

In 1975, Eric Carmen used the second movement of Rachmaninov’s Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Opus 18 as the basis for his iconic tune All By Myself which could, in many ways, be the theme song for the main character Elsa M. Anderson in Deborah Levy’s August Blue.

The concerto is often described as the “greatest piano concerto ever written” and it’s worth sitting down to listen to it (it’s about 30 minutes long). It’s also the piece Elsa was playing on stage in Vienna when things started to go awry and she simply got up and walked off of the stage.

She now finds herself adrift, going from Greece to Paris to teach teenagers, and avoiding dealing with the fallout of what happened in Vienna. She’s also avoiding trying to understand her childhood and we come to learn that she lived with adoptive parents until, at age six, she went to live with famous music teacher Arthur who she feels nurtured her talent, but not the rest of her as she was raised by nannies and housekeepers.

Early in August Blue, Elsa sees a woman across a busy market square purchasing dancing toy horses. She is captivated and decides she wants the horses herself. The woman and the horses disappear before she can catch up to them but the woman has dropped her hat which Elsa takes. Over the course of the story, Elsa catches glimpses of the woman in the different countries she goes to and starts having conversations with the woman in her mind.

August Blue is set during the pandemic (think masks and rapid tests but past the lockdowns) and it certainly evoked the feeling of those times and yet, it’s not a huge part of the novel. But, along with the way Elsa seems to be floating solo through the world, haunted by her memories and a reappearing mystery woman, it does contribute to the dreamy feeling of the book.

I devoured August Blue in two days (it is short, just over 200 pages) and the only downside to that is that I wish I’d taken more time for side trips to listen to all the musical pieces that are referenced. Surely someone will or has made a playlist for this book. While very different, it reminded me of the feeling I had reading Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water and perhaps it’s no accident that both books reference music so widely. It also reminded me of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet. Levy plays her instrument–prose–beautifully, composing melodic prose and contrapuntal images. While this was my first Levy, it won’t be my last.

Thank you the publishers for an early e-copy.
This is my first Deborah Levy and certainly won't be my last. I have owned multiple of her other books but never read them, now I can't wait to jump in and read them as soon as possible. Levy's writing is something that very much surprised me; though it shouldn't.. as I have heard amazing things about Levy.
I loved so many things about this quick tiny book. From the various locations Elsa stays in to the quick and easy connection you feel for the characters in this novel. This is the story of a famous pianist who decides to "let go", to try to find herself, through another persona, through the many stays Europe and through her thoughts about a mother she has been looking for.
I very much recommend August Blue! I cant wait to read more of Levy's work now.

When Elsa sees her doppelgänger buying toy horses, she drops everything and takes off to follow her. She's a child prodigy who was more or less raised by her piano teacher but she had no real childhood or adolescence. This is an odd novel that packs a lot into a thin volume. It's not always clear where it's going but the language is beautiful, Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction.

This review is gonna be a weird one because my feelings about this book are oddly conflicting.

I can say that I enjoyed Levy's strange odyssey about a woman who encounters her double in Athens and begins engaging in some telepathy with her, as well as coming to terms with her own past and her relationship with her adoptive father/teacher Arthur.

Levy's writing is very clean and Hemingway-esque which is very dangerous territory for a writer to wade into in my opinion because it can go so wrong. Writing can become stilted, stiff, forced, or just plain awful. But she doesn't. It toes the line of being too simple and just descriptive enough to perfectly place the reader in a given scene or moment without leaving me confused or wanting more descriptions. I read this book in like two days because I was so fascinated by how Levy was going to wrap this story up. And I think she ended the book successfully but I think I'm feeling like I was wanting more of the book in terms of the plot and the unleashing of the conflict.

Thank you endlessly to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for allowing me to read this arc!!

Elsa M. Anderson, a world-renowned pianist in her thirties, gets up in the middle of a performance and walks off the stage.

In Athens, she sees a woman who seems to be – perhaps -- her doppelgänger buy a pair of mechanical dancing horses. Elsa wishes to also buy a pair, but there are no more. The woman who purchased the horses does, however, drop her trilby hat, which Elsa picks up and begins wearing.

Elsa travels Europe, meeting up with old friends and acquaintances, pausing a couple times to provide private lessons to children.

The key word here is “enigmatic” ... both in terms of Elsa and the other characters, but also in terms of the theme of this novel. She is trying to find the motif that can bring together the disparate parts of her life ... orphan, foster child, child prodigy, virtuoso pianist, and now a refugee of sorts.

If you are looking for a nice, clean storyline that has clearly defined characters and plot, this is not at all for you, but it is a fascinating read. I loved it.

“Blue was a separation from my DNA.”

“August Blue” follows a virtuoso pianist Elsa, who finds herself at a crossroads after a fiasco performance in Vienna. A Blue Period comes into Elsa’s life: she dyes her brown hair colour blue and sets off on a journey across Europe, haunted by the presence of a mysterious woman so much like herself, but slightly different - a double or a shadow.

Although this motif of a shadow or a double is not something new in literature or cinema, Deborah Levy explores it in an intriguing way. “August Blue” reads like a puzzle, a blue box in David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”. The narrative that has been built up for Elsa doesn’t feel right anymore. She experiences both individual and global crises - as she looks for her own self, her own identity, there is a sense that a kind of metamorphosis is bound to occur.

Elsa’s world is piano, so musical elements and references flow through this novel. Despite dedicating her life to Sergei Rachmaninoff, Frédéric Chopin, Erik Satie, Philip Glass and others, Elsa starts to wonder about performance and creation. Enchanted by the free movements of the modern choreographer Isadora Duncan, she starts to look for her own composition in music and life.

“After all, she had already been written by everyone else.”

There is something special about the colour blue:

“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.” - Rebecca Solnit, in “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”

Throughout history, this colour has been playing a very important role in art, literature and even everyday life. Many artists from those of Ancient Egypt till modern artists such as Yves Klein, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso have used blue in their work to represent or anti-represent a complex variety of themes and mood. Its variety of pigments and tones has never stopped from evolving - our relationship with blue demonstrates our relationship with the world.

When I saw the title of this story I was over the moon. Given that the colour blue is such powerful material with endless possibilities, I was expecting something truly astonishing. While I enjoyed how Levy used the colour blue in her novel, for example, with a juxtaposition of metamorphosis and the process of Elsa’s hair-dying, I wished Levy used this motif in a more extensive or creative way.

Besides the colour blue motif, there are some other themes with a big potential which Levy briefly touches upon, but they end up unattended in the background - in comparison to her “The Man Who Saw Everything”, which I read earlier this year, “August Blue” felt less cohesive. As much as I enjoyed some of Elsa’s (or Levy’s ) observations, they felt slightly out of place and sometimes I struggled to make a connection between those details and the big picture. On the other hand, a really intriguing aspect of this novel and probably Levy’s work - just like musical compositions aren’t answers but questions, Levy asks you a question, wants you to figure out her novel.

This is my second Levy - there is something really appealing about the effortless way Levy interweaves the mundane and the lyrical in her writing. While I didn’t find “August Blue” as engaging as “The Man Who Saw Everything”, I thought it was an interesting reading experience and I look forward to discovering her other works.

Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux who kindly provided me with an advanced reading copy via NetGalley.

3.5/5

All of Deborah Levy’s books are charming and odd, and this one was no exception. It follows Elsa, a famous pianist, as she travels Europe teaching kids after a disappointing concert performance of her own.

This is a very simple and quiet little novel. It's beautifully written, but it didn't leave a lasting impression on me. Deborah Levy is very good at writing emotional and gripping characters. I think the main problem I had was the lack of plot/direction this book takes. Not much happens, plot-wise. "August Blue" is a character- driven novel. Even though I liked getting into the psyche of the main character, I needed more plot which is why my rating is only 3 stars. Lovely writing, just not very memorable.

NetGalley ARC Educator 550974

A fascinating read that is more of a thriller and mind bender. Eva is a child prodigy that is helping her adoptive father during his last days and wondering about her birth mother. There are references that may go over am average reader's head, stay with it. I could see the film adaptation winning many awards.

Brilliant, emotionally complex tale of a neglected child prodigy adopted and raised by her music teacher, who achieves moderate success in her career and personal life at the cost of devoting herself to others’ expectations

This is really a 4.5 star book for me. Levy is in her Cusk era and I am into it. I found this so easy to read, I had to stop myself from fully devouring it in one sitting. Levy manages to create a full atmosphere with spare but thoughtful language. It’s honestly annoying how good she is. I also love that she makes the reader work by refusing to tie things up neatly.

Thanks to Net Galley, Deborah Levy and Farrar, Strauss and Giroux for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A story of a famous pianist who chokes in a concert and then spends some time recovering and exploring other options. Along the way she sees what appears to be her double in several places. She has imaginary conversations with double that seem like a chance for personal exploration of her life and current status. From the description I expected this book to be weirder than it was. It was more about her inner struggles with her performance, her future, and her teacher/adopted father and the double is just a construct for exploring that. Fine writing, short novel, but not exciting.

I loved reading this original story about a 34-year-old pianist who walked out of a concert in Vienna. Elsa is a world-famous prodigy, adopted and mentored by an older man. Arthur was an influential piano teacher who saved Elsa from a foster family in England and taught and fathered her for many years. Elsa gives her biological mother much thought in the story. There is grief and longing on every page.

Elsa's character is one of mental torture, going almost as far as a mental breakdown. While in Athens (she agrees to teach piano lessons on an island for a weekend), Elsa sees a woman who she thinks is her doppelganger and, throughout her travel to Paris and back to England, continues to see this woman. It is a fast, lively novel weighed down with heavy notes of sadness going back to why her mother gave up the miracle child who could play piano at age six.

There was no easy ending to this fascinating tale of classical music and fame, leaving a young woman to wonder what it all meant then and how can she go forward in the future.

Whatever Deborah Levy writes, I'm there for it. There's something so atmospheric about her writing. It makes you think, while not being hard to absorb or a struggle to read. She knows how to build suspense to keep the pages turning.

This is the story of a prodigy, Elsa, who was raised by a man who was also her piano teacher after she was given up for adoption. Slowly, the reader gets to know Elsa better, her struggles with her piano career, and her relationships, both sexual and parental. Throughout the book, Elsa has a doppelganger, and she wonders who this woman is exactly. The storyline that focuses on Elsa's doppleganger is the symbolic heart of the book, which I found challenging to discern.

Like other Levy works, there's a hazy mysterious overlay that leaves the reader guessing a bit as to what is exactly going on. This strategy is so up my alley, but in prior books, I had a strong hypothesis at least of what the author meant to convey. In this book, I didn't feel quite as wowed by the ending because I didn't have this same feeling of conclusion. And when I re-read the initial chapter to see if I had missed any loose threads, I felt even less clear.

Fortunately, I didn't care all that much! It was still a very worthwhile READ, and I'd happily pick it up all over again. I appreciate works that make room for reader interpretation and speculation . . .to me, this is literature at its best. It's the type of work I want to discuss and dissect and speculate about . . .and from that perspective, Levy completely delivers.

Not my favorite Levy but I always enjoy her work! Philosophical, weird, European. I liked the twin metaphors and the sense of unease, Interesting meditation on longing and family.

A famed pianist walks off the stage to leave it all behind. Then someone begins to shadow her as the pianist works her way through Europe.
Who are we and who is our other self?

A fascinating premise.

“August Blue” was a very frustrating book to read. It follows Elsa M. Anderson, supposedly one of the most famous virtuoso pianists in the world of classical music, on a confusing journey through several European countries to find herself after giving a bad performance, spurred on by encountering an exact double of herself in Athens.

My main issue with this book: Elsa is a concert pianist, and while the book isn't necessarily about piano and her relationship to it, piano and the music world are relevant enough to its concerns that I'm extremely confused by the strange, naive portrayal here. The writing suggests a little research was done into classical piano and what the life of a pianist looks like, but not much more than that; at one point, Elsa assigns a student (whose ability is never really gauged anyway) a Brahms sonata that doesn't exist:

"By the way, I want you to practise Brahms's Piano Sonata No. 1 in C minor, Op. 49." Even for an exceptionally gifted student like Marcus this was an impossible task.

At first I thought Elsa (or Levy) was being funny, the joke being that the task is literally impossible because that piece doesn't exist as described (Brahms does have a first piano sonata in C major, op. 1), but it never comes up again. This was pretty much my breaking point with the book; it seems like all it would have taken was a google search to double check the information here.

It seems Levy has no idea what actually happens in a piano lesson, either; in some of Elsa's lessons she takes over and plays entire pieces for the student, while in another she just asks the student to play through a full piece at a slow tempo while she just sits there. This is the same lesson where she tells a student who wants to play Satie's first Gymnopédie that instead she should be working on Chopin's Étude op. 25 no. 6, which is sort of like telling someone reading "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" that they should instead read "Ulysses."

One of the catalyzing events of the novel is Elsa’s “messing up” while performing Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto in Vienna; supposedly, her fingers refuse to do what they’re supposed to do and instead she plays something entirely different (while, we later learn, the conductor apparently turns around and mocks her to the audience). Even this is bizarre: memory slips are a real phenomenon, as are all sorts of other mistakes that could ruin a concert experience, but usually what happens is we forget what we’re playing and blank out completely, or miss lots of notes; playing something else randomly is sort of absurd. It’s even more absurd to me when, later, it’s implied by another character that Elsa’s playing random music during that concert (which I guess we’re meant to understand is an improvisation or composition by her) is somehow an artistic achievement, that by not playing the Rachmaninoff and instead playing her own music she was breaking free of convention (or something). I think even that idea could be played off convincingly somehow (I think most things can), but it isn’t here; it feels like a weird afterthought.

I understand that as someone who went to music school and studied piano, my tolerance for these inaccuracies is lower than many other potential readers'. But I think it raises a point about the attention we (as writers) owe our subject matter. I wouldn't anticipate that Levy would write a completely perfect book that reflects every pianist's experience to the level, and I don't think that's necessary or even desirable. When we take an interest in a way of life (or anything unfamiliar to us) as a writer, it seems crucial to approach that way of life with care; I mean to care about the fidelity with which we portray that thing. The entire time I felt as if Levy had no interest in actually speaking to anyone who plays the piano, because that’s how the book reads.

All of this is beside the fact that I found the prose confusing and muddled. The dialogue and relationships between characters are stilted, and most of the characters don’t end up feeling important or even relevant: they’re all there to prop up Elsa and to get us closer to understanding how special she is (or something). Elsa herself is very childish; I think this is in part supposed to be because her childhood was in some ways nonexistent due to her relentless pursuit of piano, but her interactions with other people are weird, and the book almost feels like a preteen’s hallucination of what her life might be like as a concert pianist. When reading about Levy’s other work (this is my first encounter with her writing) I often see descriptions of it as resembling a dream or even a hallucination. There are many books that I love that have this atmosphere, but I think in order to achieve it there’s a necessary balance between coherence and incoherence, and that’s not a balance I find here; “August Blue” is all over the place (technical term). Elsa supposedly encounters a double of herself at a marketplace in Athens, where the doppelganger buys a pair of mechanical, battery-operated toy horses that Elsa herself wants; Elsa then steals her hat in revenge, an act that supposedly binds them together forever and begins the weird series of encounters that continue throughout the book. Simultaneously, Elsa seems to be communicating constantly with the doppelganger in her head. When they meet up bizarre things happen like the doppelganger dropping a lit cigar into her drink. I was confused if I was supposed to understand this as some kind of allegory; I think that might be the intent, but I have no idea.

Without going into it, I’ll end by pointing to another example of art made by a non-musician about classical music that I found beautifully representative in a lot of ways: the film Tár by Todd Field. To quote Zachary Woolfe, the New York Times classical critic (who doesn’t even seem to like the film, for what it’s worth!):

“If that fantasy is persuasive, it’s because, for all its noirish, even horror-movie trappings, “Tár” is a largely realistic depiction of its subject matter. (Far more so than “Black Swan” in relation to ballet, or “Whiplash” to jazz.) Blanchett gestures on the podium like a real conductor; a few references to the symphony she is preparing as “the Five” — rather than “the Fifth” or “Mahler Five” — are almost the only slips of tone.”

Throughout Tár (a two-and-a-half hour film that uses classical music EXTENSIVELY as a backdrop!) I found myself stunned by the level of detail in so many places. It was funny to see that film very shortly after finishing this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and FSG for the e-ARC! August Blue is Deborah Levy’s latest work following a pianist’s life after a faulty performance as her mentor is ill. I have some conflicting feelings about this one because while Levy’s writing is deeply descriptive and vivid, the plot felt a bit too disjointed for my personal enjoyment. Although the vibes carried this more than the plot for me, I did like getting to go through Elsa’s internal monologue as she navigates grief and coming to terms with her identity. I can definitely see myself picking up more of her work in the future.

Stream of consciousness carries this novel to be worldly yet intimate. I knew the character then not at all. There is a keen eye on society, its pitfalls and illusions, as the main character tells the story. The novel is the right length. If it were any longer, I would have lost interest.

Music and traveling compliments the story. The story is set during the pandemic yet is subtly written throughout as an observation and reminder. The character's relationships serve a purpose. It reveals a lot about the character's values and personality.

I think about How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful by Florence and The Machine and The Eddy on Netflix as cultural relations to the story.