From the award-winning and genre-defying writer comes an eclectic collection of essays, some of which are short enough to be classed as vignettes. Topics range across literary theory and criticism, writing practice, gender and sexuality, intimate ruminations … and the odd piece that is so random as to defy classification.
Her love of female French writers initiates the collection, with pieces concerning the writing lives of Colette and Margueritte Duras. The third essay is titled, ‘My Beautiful Brothel Creepers’, and speaks of the shoes she bought aged 17 and how they might relate to a zest for life … depending on whether or not socks were worn with them. The titular piece refers to the strange practices of an old neighbour. Details of the correct positioning of spoons, however, pales against this neighbour’s decision to intercept Levy’s mail. But it is with writing of gender and its imbalances that Levy shines. In ‘A Mouthful of Grey’ she wryly notes that the magnificently high-brow Virginia Woolf’s name now ‘graces’ a decidedly low-brow meal combo of burger, coleslaw and fries. Levy’s satire is exemplified in ‘X = Freedom’, an elegy for the artist, Meret Oppenheim, whose desire was to be known as an artist, not just a ‘female artist’.
The collection in The Position of Spoons may be random, but each piece displays a writer in full control of her craft and the ability to observe the world through the prism of an acute female eye.
Reviewed by Bob Moore
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Deborah Levy was born in 1969, studied theatre at Dartington College of Arts, and now lives in London. Her plays include Pax, which City Limits considred ‘remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination’ and Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, ‘An ambitious, imaginative, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, passage across a terrain where moral parables and folk fancies meet’ (Marina Warner, Independent).
She has also published a collection of short stories, Ophelia and the Great Idea, and a novel, Beautiful Mutants, and, most recently, Swallowing Geography.
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