Home › Books › Real Estate: A Living Autobiography
Real Estate: A Living Autobiography
by
94/99
Critics' Rating Index
60/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
98/99
Volume of Reviews
82/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
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
"Each one holds a beautifully distilled idea, a question worth returning to, or a description so cockeyed and lovely it begs the reader to linger."
"a careful balancing act of withholding and revelation."
"Or perhaps it's a function of reading in post-pandemic times, when the apocalyptic repercussions of all our decisions are newly inescapable, but as she steps into her air conditioned hotel in Mumbai I found myself crabbily thinking of carbon emissions and refugees ..."
"It's Levy's openness to the quirks and peccadilloes of others that makes Levy's work so invigorating."
"Typical Levy - curious about the world and seeing wonder in it."
"It is clear that in her 'living autobiography' she has relaxed and matured."
"At its best, Real Estate offers the same hard-won, lucid wisdom that made The Cost of Living essential reading for anyone who has a mother or is one ..."
"We don't have to own the house we yearn for in order to be fulfilled ..."
"She herself is not always a purely likable, or reliable, narrator of her own experience, and her book is the richer for it."
"Levy's story initially begins as a stream of consciousness but soon evolves into a beautifully written interconnected piece featuring eloquent descriptions of her surroundings and quotes from writers that infiltrate her thoughts ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!