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Fiction. Literature. Thriller. HTML: From the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Swimming Home, a single volume comprising her first two novels: Beautiful Mutants, long out of print, and Swallowing Geography, never before published in the United States. Beautiful Mutants, Deborah Levy's surreal first novel, introduces a manipulative and magical Russian exile who summons forth a series of grotesques�??among them the Poet, the Banker, and the Anorexic Anarchist. Levy explores the anxieties that pervaded the 1980s: exile and emigration, broken dreams, crazed greed and the first seeds of the global financial crisis, self-destructive desires, and the disintegration of culture. It is a feverish allegory written in prose so beautiful and acrobatic that it could only come from a poet. This remarkable and pioneering debut is as much about language as it is the world that ensnares and alienates us. In Swallowing Geography, J. K., like her namesake Jack Kerouac, is always on the road, traveling Europe with her typewriter in a pillowcase. She wanders, meeting friends and strangers, battling her raging mother, and taking in the world through her uniquely irreverent, ironic perspective. Levy blends fairytale with biting satire, pushing at the edges of reality and marveling at where the world collapses in on itself. In this stunningly original novel, Deborah Levy searches deep into the heart of the late-twentieth century and does not hold back on what she finds there.… (more)
User reviews
Beautiful Mutants (1989)
This is Levy's first published book, and shows that the talent that
Swallowing Geography (1993)
Levy's second novella is even shorter, and is a more cryptic and elusive story, which is episodic, describing a female traveller known only as J.K. and her relationships with various lovers. I found this one quite difficult to follow, so less satisfying, but that probably says more about my limitations as a reader than about the quality of the book.