Gosh I just love Deborah Levy. Her writing is so dreamy and summery and trancelike. I didn’t love the more modern references to FaceTime and covid, that took me out of it a bit, but overall just as magical as all her other fiction.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. After leaving a recital in Vienna after about halfway through the program, Elsa is somewhat lost. As everyone is just emerging after the pandemic, Elsa is going to give private piano lessons to a nervous boy, with a rich and constantly angry father, in Athens and then on to Paris for more lessons to a day dreaming young woman. In between, Elsa meets old friends who encourage her to get back on the stage, she meets an overeager potential lover and learns that her teacher, a man who taught her all she knows about music and adopted her when she was a musical protege at six, is in seriously declining health. And with all this, in every city she travels to, she sees a woman who looks like she could be her double. Coincidence or hallucination? This slim book is packed with more ideas than most books twice its length.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the digital advanced review copy.

'My dear, he said, we will meet under its fruit-laden boughs when the pandemics is over.'

In Deborah Levy's most recent novel, what could be considered to be one of her most experimental and daring works, we meet Elsa, a disgraced pianist who is still suffering the effects of her public humiliation at a Rachmaninoff recital. While she is in Greece, Elsa meets a women whom she is convinced is her double, a fateful meeting which leads Elsa on a journey towards coming to terms with her past and her future as an artist. The women's omnipresence, and Elsa's internalised dialogues with this other self, are elements which create tension, leading to a climactic faceoff at the end of the novel. Similarly to Levy's previous novels and her autobiographical trilogy, the novel deals with themes of family and loss and the compromises and dilemmas that come with being a female artist. The maternal relation (from the Cost of Living/Hot Milk) and the notion of real estate (Real Estate) are core concepts which are also important in this novel. The importance of chosen family is expressed through the relationship between Elsa and Arthur Goldstein, who also has to come to terms with has share in Elsa's past. As she travels from place to place teaching various students (who end up teaching her valuable lessons), Elsa learns about the cost of living, loving and losing, and realises that you can deviate away from life's fixed compositions and compose your own handmade destiny. August Blue is also one of the first novels I've read which captures the reality of living in the pandemic, capturing the fragility of life and the bonds between individuals.

While its story itself isn't too long, August Blue manages to linger with me for days after my reading experience. August Blue is clean, concise, and confident about the story it seeks to tell. An interesting feature of the story is that it does situate itself in a post-pandemic time, a nod to "returning back to the world" since covid-19's prominence since 2020. While mentioned sparingly, it does help contrast our narrator's thoughts on returning to the world since her fiasco musical performance. Levy herself doesn't even seem too preoccupied on the gibberish of maintaining one's identity through a career, making the story all the more interesting by not trying to sell readers a think piece or an inspired narrator trying to regain who she was. Perhaps its the narrator's discovery of her identity with the difference between career and curiosity that is the most endearing in the absence of these things as she spends most of her time giving music lessons and thinking of her most formative relationships she has built, being that, she opens herself up to understanding that relationships are harder to imagine the end of than any other experience. Although, maybe except about how she feels about dyeing her hair blue.

I love Deborah Levy for how intelligent and experimental her writing is--I group her with Ali Smith as writers whose books are dense with underlying meanings, connections and symbolism that rewards careful and close reading. "August Blue" is no exception. Even though the plot synopsis--Elsa M. Anderson, a renowned classical pianist, freezes during a concert in Vienna and subsequently takes time off to travel around Europe (Greece, Paris, London) where she gives piano lessons and keeps bumping into a mysterious woman who she believes is her doppelganger--seems pretty straightforward, the book is anything but. Childhood abandonment, the color blue, family and identity, mechanical horses, artistic freedom and integrity, a battered hat--Levy weaves all these things and more into this slim novel, one that I'm pretty sure I won't fully understand even after multiple readings. Which is exactly what I'm looking for in a Deborah Levy novel.

Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with a ARC of this title in return for my honest review.

Elsa is an orphan, adopted at a young age by a piano teacher who saw her great talent. She grew up with nannies and piano lessons, and became one of the world's most famous musician. In "August Blue", we get to see a slice of her life, after she "lost it" during a concert in Vienna. She then travels from Greece to her home in London, from London to Paris and Italy, teaching young rich piano students. She keeps seeing a woman, much like her, whom she feels attracted and linked to. Elsa is a fascinating character. She is quite ambiguous, I never knew what to expect from her, and once I got that there were many "grey areas" in this novel, after about a third of the novel, I enjoyed it even more. Interesting reflexions on family, success, talent and identity. It might be a good choice for a book club!

Deborah Levy is inimitable. There are so many writers I love and admire, whose voices are so strong—and yet they could be copied, even if poorly. Even if we can tell that it's just an imitation. But how can you ever replicate Deborah Levy's distinctive writing voice? I could know it everywhere and never be able to explain it.

I don't know what to say about "August Blue." It is a strange book, like all of Levy's novels. Likewise, it has a preoccupation with mothers and daughters, with Greece, and hot weather, and the sea, and desire. You can't pin it down, can't explain what about it you loved so much in any form that would matter, that would make someone else understand it.

Stanley Cavell says that love is about your words having meaning only for the right person. Or you saying the right thing only to the right person. This is precisely what this book is about to me, or rather it's perhaps why this book made sense to me.

Well I liked it, but I'm also confused by it. Which made it challenging to choose a star rating. Maybe it's the kind of book you need to read more than once to fully grasp. Or maybe it's meant to be mysterious. The writing is great and I found the story line interesting. It was thought provoking in that it made me question the ways we see ourselves and judge ourselves for the mistakes we make. I also found it weird to read about the pandemic we just lived through. It's a shorter book so definitely worth giving it a try. Thank you NetGalley and Hamish Hamilton for an ARC of August Blue by Deborah Levy.

I completely adore “August Blue”….
And ‘man-oh-man’, I’ve got a rush on Deborah Levy.

This is a short book, but from the very beginning to the very end, I enjoyed the entire atmosphere, the feelings, the music, the mystery, the dialogue, the intimate inner voice of our protagonist and the sweetness I felt for
*Madame Blue*and her life-experiences.

I didn’t read this with any intellectual commitment…..I just enjoyed it… fully enjoyed it !

The opening was one the best introductions into the ongoing journey we’re invited to take — as any book I’ve ever read: creative, visual, suspenseful, and fascinating.
“I first saw her in a flea market in Athens, buying two mechanical, dancing horses. The man who sold them to her was slipping a battery into the belly of the brown horse, and a super-heavy-duty-zinc AA. He showed her that to start the horse, which was the length of two large hands, she had to lift up its tail. To stop it she must pull the tail down. The brown horse had a string tied to its neck and if she held the string upwards and outward, she could direct its movements”.
“Up went to tail, and the horse began to dance, it’s for hinged legs trotting in a circle. He then showed her the white horse, with its black mane and white hooves. Did he want her to slip an AA into its belly so it too could begin to dance? Yes, she replied in English, but her accent was from somewhere else”.
“I was watching her from a stall laid out with miniature plaster statues of Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Apollo, Aphrodite. Some of these gods and goddesses have been turned into fridge magnets. Their final metamorphosis”.

Elsa A. Anderson was a thirty-four year old classical piano virtuoso.
The old masters were Elsa’s shield: Beethoven. Bach. Rachmaninov, Schumann.
“Their inner lives are valuable without measure”.

My thoughts about BLUE HAIR ….. [Elsa dyed her hair BLUE]….referring to the title of the book.
‘Blue’ has always been linked to tranquility, so it would make sense that people with blue hair are thought to be calm people.
But … it’s also a bold statement to dye one’s hair blue…. possibly suggesting it’s
‘my time’…honoring dreams…being more fully who we really are … experiencing life fuller.
So….
…..as they say, if the shoe fits…the shoe fits!

“The colourist was very tense.
“For a moment, I thought about my birth mother”.
“And then my foster-mother”.
“My new sleek, blue hair rippled down my back to just above my waist”.
“I had two mothers. One had given me up. And I had given up the woman who had replaced her. I could hear them gasping”.
“Author flung his arms in the air. My dear, he said, as I don’t have an open sleigh to be pulled by huskies across the stormy streets of London, we will share a taxi. You, Elsa M. Anderson, are now a natural blue.”
“Madame Blue”.

Markus was a thirteen year old boy with a German shepherd, a fierce dog, named Skippy.
After Elsa had made a mistake performing one night [Sergei Rachmaninoff] she walked off stage — and set-out to travel.

Marcus, was to be Elsa’s student in Greece. He played for Elsa the Saranande from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1. the first time getting together.
Their relationship was charming — walks for lemonade—their conversations— and their playful moments.
Marcus liked to dance with his dog Skippy to Prince.
Elsa liked to watch Isadora Duncan and dance along with her.
They were an endearing pair!

Elsa also started up a friendship with Tomas, who had been sick on the boat coming from Paris to Grace. They drink a lot of alcohol together after favorite bar. And went swimming at two a.m.

Elsa would see the woman who bought the horses again in Northern London.
“I’ve got your hat”, Elsa said to the woman in her head. “When you return the horses, I will give it back to you”.
“It’s not a matter of returning the horses, she replied. Just because you want them doesn’t mean you can have them”.

“I thought of my double in Athens and Paris as I played. Like my mother, she, too, was listening very attentively. What I saw were the pink flowers growing by the Acropolis. I let them enter the music. They had taken me back to another ancient history. To the table, clause and toast, and the blackberry bushes are the first six years with my foster parents, to the chickens in the garden, and the roses falling away from the wall. They had try to give me a home.

Yummy descriptions of salad with watermelon with feta cheese was mouthwatering…..
And when Elsa heard the midnight resonance of the woman who had bought the horses…..I felt lonely along with Elsa ….
and her thoughts about Isadora Duncan…..
who believed in freedom of expression — had inspired Elsa, was moving to me, too.
Isabel Duncan used to inspire me when I was growing up as well— I loved my modern dance classes.

There is much more I could share about this slim novel — more introspective/cerebral details ….Elsa’s powerful music teacher, Author, who was like a father to her - etc.
and other characters Bella and Max, but most ….
I simply enjoyed the entire feeling of being in Deborah Levy-land.

Loved it!

“august blue” is one of those novels with a protagonist that makes you say “she’s literally me!” elsa is a piano player who gives teenagers lessons. on a trip to greece, she sees a woman who is incredibly similar to her in terms of looks, and an obsession starts.

when i thought this was going to be sapphic in nature, it sure wasn’t. elsa sleeps with a lot men, which is totally fine, but i was led to believe this was a sapphic novel.

the prose is gorgeous and puts you right in the center of greece, on the sea, and in a london apartment. it was truly a wonderful experience reading this, though the ending let me down. i still found it incredibly beautiful, and it provided an almost mini-vacation for me.

“maybe i am”

thank you netgalley and the publisher for an arc in exchange for an honest review!

Levy has established her own patch and it’s an intriguing one. This novel is more allusive than some, but also surprisingly tight in what initially seems a loose structure. Doppelgängers, European scenarios, creative women wash around tantalizingly until the author knits them together with a smile and a bow. Her fans will not be disappointed.

I fear I’m neither smart nor patient enough to fully enjoy a book of this type. I kept wanting the story to cohere in a more traditional, yes, Hollywood-network sitcom way. And why are there interspersions of an unseen voice saying “Maybe I am”? Oh, wait, I think that’s our heroine talking to herself.
However, even I couldn’t dodge the talent behind the elliptical story. In between readings, the sound of Levy’s writing stayed with me, narrating my own world with her authority and intelligence.
Thanks to NetGalley for an opportunity to challenge myself a little with this unusual novel.

With time slips, doppelgängers, doublings, and identity crises, there’s an air of unsettled reality to Deborah Levy’s August Blue; and being set in the post-lockdown Covid days of first vaccines and voluntary mask use, there’s certainly something relatable about this questioning of who we are; questioning how we live. With a stream of artists evoked — from Rachmaninoff and Isadora Duncan to Proust and French film director Agnès Varda — who are presented as having used art to explore their own realities, Levy seems to be asking the reader to search for meaning beyond the printed page (and with some [widely noted in other reviews] odd parallels to the movie Frozen and what appear to be mistakes in the timeline, I really don’t think the author wants us to take her at her literal words here). As straightforward storytelling, this is an odd little tale of a young woman trying to figure out who she is (and why she is and why she continues to be), but as an artistic rendering of our (more or less) collective post-Covid experience, Levy captures something very true about the unreality of the time; it feels essential that artists like Levy try to capture what, beyond the base details, most of us have trouble putting into words about the pandemic experience — even if the reader needs to peek behind the words to see it. I loved this.

I'm a Levy fan and August Blue is an intriguing novel. In part about the aftermath, how Elsa, a world-class pianist who walked off a stage when she lost, or her hands refused, the Rachmaninoff she was to be playing, it's also about origin stories, how necessary they are, to know who we are, where we come from, who are parents are, our lineage and our blood. Potential doubling, identity, sexual politics, to a degree, set in Greece and London and Paris and Sardinia, deep in the pandemic, it's a story, like other of Levy's works, that will remain in the mind, wondering the new turns Elsa's life might be taking. Thanks for the opportunity to read it in advance of its US publication

Deborah Levy’s <i>August Blue</i> reminds me of the classic corny joke about the old guy complaining about his senior dinner to a waiter: <i>”I didn’t like my chicken dinner, and my portion was too small.”</i>

Deborah Levy included bits and pieces of at least three novels in <i>August Blue</i>: Elsa Anderson’s origin story joined with Arthur’s decline and death; Elsa’s abandoned concert of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto 2; and Elsa’s double. Two of these felt near complete, one felt less relevant and almost an unwelcome diversion from the other two.

For this reader, Elsa’s origin story joined with Arthur’s decline and death was the most fulfilled story. The gaps in Elsa’s origin story felt real and convincing, as did her refusal to learn about her birth parents and her foster parents despite Arthur’s repeated offers. <i>”For a moment I thought about my birth mother. And then my foster-mother. . . I had two mothers. One had given me up. And I had given up the woman who had replaced her.”</i>

Elsa’s abandoned concert was also affecting, despite the somewhat obvious choice of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto 2 with its famous back story of the composer’s recovery from his breakdown and the <i>”I don’t know where you are, but I’m in Carnegie Hall”</i> response to Fritz Kreisler. I especially liked Elsa’s interchange with her friend Julia: <i>”There was clearly something happening to our virtuoso, Julia said, frowning now. The man with the baton heard your detour, he could have calmed the orchestra, he could have created silence. You are not a beginner, after all. We could have heard Elsa M. Anderson’s first concerto and not Rach’s second.”</i>

Elsa’s mysterious doppelganger struck me as insufficiently integrated, with the toy <i>”horses that were a portal to another world.”</i> Deborah Levy’s namesake,

<i>August Blue</i> is the fourth Deborah Levy novel that I’ve read, her most compelling, and my favorite. Before <i>August Blue</i>, I had come to think of Levy’s novels like ice cream cones, delicious when I’m eating them, but melting rapidly. Other than a few scenes, Levy’s earlier novels have never stuck with me. I suspect that <i>August Blue</i> will have a high stickiness quotient and prominent parts will remain with me to think about and puzzle over.

I would like to thank Farrar, Straus and Giroux as well as NetGalley for generously providing me a review copy of <I>August Blue</I>.

3.5, rounded down. I enjoyed this slightly more than The Man Who Saw Everything, and much less than Hot Milk. But all three Levy novels are built according to the same blueprint: the novelistic equivalent of an elliptical European art film from the 70s (Agnès Varda? Chantal Akerman?).

Our first-person narrator Elsa M. Anderson is a blue-haired (yes, I agree with my GR friends that the Disney princess allusion was deliberate) concert pianist who has fled her high-flying career after freezing up during Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, and flits from one European capital to another giving music lessons to teenagers. From time to time, she runs into (or narrowly misses) a woman whom she perceives as her Doppelgänger, whose trilby hat she wears throughout the novel as a talisman.

We never experience the world outside her head, and her subjective experience of time and other humans appears to be severely warped. More important, her own sense of identity seems unformed, deformed, even dissociative, now that her virtuoso performance days are over. She is strangely incurious about the circumstances of her adoption and the identity of her parents. She has difficulty forming relationships with others, and has a highly dysfunctional and neglectful relationship with her foster father Arthur, the piano teacher who raised her and groomed her for a career as a virtuoso, willfully blind to the fact that he has been in a long-term relationship with a man. And since the novel takes place in Covidian times, masking is also an on-the-nose metaphor for the masks we wear as we perform our sense of selfhood...

The puzzle didn't cohere for me this time, and Levy is making her readers work harder than ever to piece their way through the fragments. I didn't expect a neat resolution, and tried not to make too much sense of what I was reading. But as I'm distilling my experiences a few days later, it wasn't especially engaging or memorable, compared to other novels in her impressive career.

]Many thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC (months early) in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

Deborah Levy has written another lyrical absorbing novel.I was immediately drawn in totally involved in her writing her story the characters..A book that had me read slowly enjoying from beginning to end.#netgalley #fsg

I find Deborah Levy to be one of the most fascinating experimental writers working today; I place her on my short-list of absolute favorites, right beside Ali Smith. August Blue, the (forthcoming) newest of Deborah Levy’s novels, is—like most of her work—something of an infinity mirror reflecting the author’s longtime interests and themes: doubling, identity, echoes, feminism, sexuality, parenting, time slippage, and travel in all its aspects.

Here, Elsa M. (for Miracle?) Anderson, known in her childhood as Ann, once a child prodigy and now a famous concert pianist is at a crossroads. After years of success and fame, she has recently given a disastrous concert in Vienna, when while playing a piece that she has often performed, Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2, she loses her nerve and is unable to play the piece. This has become a very public failure.

During the course of the novel, Elsa travels to Greece, Italy, England, and France and encounters a number of people, real and perhaps imagined. She grapples with her pain, her history and her memories. The novel tracks Elsa’s movement from fragmentation, albeit within a very disciplined life, towards a more complicated integrality.

The novel opens at a flea market in Athens. Elsa, who is on her way to provide private piano lessons to a teenager living on the island of Poros, encounters a woman who purchases two mechanical dancing horses, which Elsa believes should belong to her instead; the woman drops her hat and Elsa picks it up and begins to wear it constantly. Although the two women do not speak, they recognize one another, and the encounter sets into place one of the central relationships of the novel. The two women are deeply linked, and Elsa will find that her doppelgänger pops up a number of times in the coming weeks; Elsa will also experience ongoing internal dialogues with her. The character becomes an alter ego that Elsa in her isolation can engage with. Whether this character represents a live person or not, or whether she is at times real and at times imagined, is not important to this novel (as, of course, it should not really be to the reader, who must accept that “reality” is not ever possible within the pages of any fiction), but instead, the focus of interest are the memories, dreams, and interactions that involve the two women.

Another important relationship for Elsa is with her mentor, teacher, and adoptive father, Arthur, who is in his final months of life in a house in Sardinia. Arthur holds the key to Elsa’s parentage and childhood. She is both drawn towards and terrified of finding out who her mother was. As a child prodigy, Elsa was taken from her foster parents and she has no memories of any earlier life; now, as part of her process, she must open the doors to some of her earliest memories. Along the way, she encounters a number of complicated parent/child relationships. She ends up teaching piano lessons to two teenagers, both of whom are grappling with their own growing up and managing expectations of their own complicated parents. These stories too become part of the echoing aspects of Elsa’s experiences.

Music is a central aspect of this novel, and has been the focus of Elsa’s life up to this point. Elsa’s connection with Rachmaninov, who she refers to as Rach, creates more opportunities for doubling. “Although we lived in different centuries, both Rach and I were popular soloists at a young age, giving concerts at various conservatories.” The concerto that becomes impossible for her to play in Vienna—not coincidentally, a piece written at the depth of Rachmaninov’s despair—itself becomes a central conversation in the novel. (Although it was not explicitly mentioned, I realized that yet another echo is that the melody of the pop song “All by Myself” made popular by Eric Carmen and later Celine Dion came directly from Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2.)

Several chapters into the novel, Elsa is able to revisit the concerto, and plays it on an out-of-tune Yamaha in the London St. Pancras train station for a gathering crowd of commuters: “I let Rach confide in me again.” After she plays, she is given flowers by a stranger, yet another double, here a woman also named “Ann, without an e” (Elsa’s childhood name) who tells her that “the Rachmaninov had moved her beyond…it had even made her forget she was alive.”

It is in music that Elsa is best able to access her deeper selves, but she also realizes that she needs to move beyond leaning on the emotions that she borrows from the work of the greats: “It is so abject to express this loneliness within me. I am not sure I can take the freedom to find a language in music to reveal it. I have, after all, learned to conceal it. The old masters are my shield. Beethoven. Bach. Rachmaninov. Schumann. Their inner lives are valuable without measure.”

By the end of the novel, we begin to see Elsa resolve some of her fears and reach for her own uncertain selves. The suggestion is made that tentative steps may be opening up opportunities for a more authentic future, with perhaps further creative leaps towards developing her own voice. This idea is reinforced when a woman that had been in attendance at the Vienna concert tells her of the excitement that she felt hearing her go off script: “It is true that we lost Rachmaninov’s second concerto for piano, she said, but for two minutes and twelve seconds we listened to Elsa M. Anderson play something that made us stop breathing.”

I found this novel to be absolutely breathtaking. My thanks to the book's American publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley for an opportunity to read an ARC of the book.

My first Deborah Levy and definitely won't be my last.

August Blue was haunting in many ways, but not in a frightening way. Instead, it pulled the reader along and made you feel as if you were floating: through the air, through city streets, through the Mediterranean sea... You're just sort of carried along, as you would be through a dream. You never feel like your feet are on solid ground save for a few moments here or there, but you find you don't actually mind.

This is a very internalized story, so if you're looking for tons of plot and momentum, it's not for you. However, if you're content to sit quietly and simply absorb what's going on around you, you'll really love this. I certainly did.

Thanks to NetGalley as usual for the early read!

August Blue by Deborah Levy follows Elsa M. Anderson is a classical piano virtuoso. In a flea market in Athens, she watches an enigmatic woman buy two mechanical dancing horses. Is it possible that the woman who is so enchanted with the horses is her living double? Is she also looking for reasons to live? Chasing their doubles across Europe, the two women grapple with their conceptions of the world and each other, culminating in a final encounter in a fateful summer rainstorm.

This book had all of the elements in books I love: no real plot just vibes, character study, European setting, short, no quotation marks for dialogues, and discussions of sexuality and individuality. However, this book just left me feeling confused and dumb. I'm not sure if this book was too smart for me, I'm just too dumb for it, or a combination of both. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy this one.

I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.