Swimming Home by Deborah Levy: book review

Swimming Home: A Novel (2012) is set in 1994 in Alpes-Maritimes near Nice in France.

Joe Jacobs knew it was a mistake from the beginning. Joe was a married man with a fourteen-year-old daughter, and Kitty Finch was a young botanist with green-painted fingernails on holiday at the same mountain villa. It begins when Joe goes for a walk with Kitty on a botany lesson to learn more about the mountain flowers.

Kitty is the equivalent of Jack Kerouac’s Nature Boy Saint. The title comes from a poem that Kitty writes—Swimming Home.

Fifty-seven-year-old Joe is a poet, his wife Isabel is a war correspondent, and his daughter Nina still has her childhood stuffed toy rabbit. Seven years later, in London, twenty-one-year-old Nina has the last word.

The novel is described, in its introduction, as a ‘kaleidoscopic narrative’ because it ‘tears its characters apart’ – and they reform into weird and wonderful images. This strange novel is indeed fragmented, until the secrets are revealed.

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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