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Real Estate: A Living Autobiography
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About This Book
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, the Washington Post , TIME , and Kirkus A Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year A USA Today Book Not to Miss A LitHub Best-Reviewed Book of the Year Real Estate is the third and final installment in three-time Booker Prize nominated Deborah Levy's Living Autobiography an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the specters that haunt it in our patriarchal society. "Three bicycles. Seven ghosts. A crumbling apartment block on the hill. Fame. Tenderness. The statue of Peter Pan. Silk. Melancholy. The banana tree. A love story." Virginia Woolf wrote that in order to be a writer, a woman needs a room of one's own. Now, in Real Estate , acclaimed author Deborah Levy concludes her ground-breaking trilogy of living autobiographies with an exhilarating, boldly intimate meditation on home and the specters that haunt it. In this vibrant memoir, Levy employs her characteristic indelible writing, sharp wit, and acute insights to craft a searing examination of womanhood and ownership. Her inventory of possessions, real and imagined, pushes readers to question our cultural understanding of belonging and belongings and to consider the value of a woman's intellectual and personal life. Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory, Real Estate is a brilliant, compulsively readable narrative.
Reviews
"In Real Estate, Levy reserves her prettiest writing — which, I should note, is never, ever flowery — for her "unreal estate": the dream house she designs and redesigns throughout the book ..."
"We don't have to own the house we yearn for in order to be fulfilled ..."
"What Levy has taught me is that this stage of life – let's call it late midlife – does not need to be just about endings."
"Levy's wry humor and attention to the art of living make her good company on the page, with wisdom weaved in from her touchstone authors, including James Baldwin, Walter Benjamin, and Leonora Carrington."
"Levy has slipped into more comfortable clothing and unpinned her curls: the writing is looser, her tone wryer, the incidents more anecdotal than transformative."
"Like Fitzgerald, Levy has a gift for the pithy, annihilating moment of gnomic insight .."
"The result is a beautifully crafted and thought-provoking snapshot of a life."
"In closing, as Levy inventories her possessions, she is able to find fresh meaning among her belongings."
"Her prose is at once playful and multilayered."
"The book feels as if we're listening in on her very thoughts, and yet those thoughts are composed off-screen ..."
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