“I want to blow out smoke. Like a volcano. Like a monster. I want to fume”: Deborah Levy’s ‘Hot Milk’

I started out really liking this book. The Hélène Cixous quote at the beginning hooked me in like a fish and I was immediately immersed in the intensity of the story, simultaneously surreal like a mystic dream vision and scalding as a sunburn slap. But about two thirds of the way in, I started to feel a sense of disillusionment with the trajectory, some things were just not clicking and my hackles were rising. I was pitched into indecision about everything I had thought up until that point. I felt like I was being led in Shandean circles in this strange maze-like limbo which threatened to slowly and arduously taper out leaving a longing for any kind of resolution or closure. This is the reason to love Laurence Sterne, but here the taste was sour as everything zeroed in on that one essential question: what’s the point? And then, about fifty pages from the end, I spiralled heart and soul into the mirage.

Turns out, I loved it.

Let me try to articulate why.

Things that are mentioned a lot:

• cracking lips
• milk
• medusas
• monsters

The cracking lips are also paralleled with many similarly cracked and cracking things. The computer screen of the opening lines. Stung skin. Human bonds. Bone-deep identity. European economies. “Financial institutions everywhere.” This becomes something of a motif, riffing, for me, off Hemingway’s broken places.

Sofia Papastergiadis is the narrator, a woman in her 20s from East London who works at a café making artisan coffee with a first-class degree and masters in anthropology. She lives by an anthropological quote about how one must study babies, animals, and primitive people, be psychoanalysed, get over a religious conversion, and have a psychotic episode as the surefire means by which to find true insight. She’s abandoned her doctorate on memory, however, to take her ailing mother to Almería, Spain, where the narrative begins, and where she hopes to find treatment that will free them both. Because both of them are broken.

“I am not okay. Not at all and haven’t been for some time… The word ‘major’ was in my mind that night in southern Spain. It was 7 p.m., which is twilight, the end of the long day of sunshine and the start of early evening, and with my eyes firmly on the cracked cosmology of shattered lonely stars and milky clouds, I heard a kind of lament slipping from my lips about losing my way, stuff about a lost spaceship and putting my helmet on and how something was wrong and how I had lost contact with Earth but no one could hear me.”

Sofia is, at times, a frustrating guide through the maze, especially when her emotions feel inhumanly checked and it becomes ambiguous what exactly is real and what isn’t. “I am anti the major plots”, she says. It took me a good long while to connect with her, but connection did eventually happen, as you can probably guess, around the page 150 mark. As the eccentric doctor Gómez observes, there is a certain je ne sais quoit about her, “Love explodes near her like a war”. Bar the one reality-warping moment when it takes her an entire conversation with Love Interest 1 in the injury hut on the beach being treated for a medusa sting before she realises her boobs have popped out, the arc of her character is mesmerising.

She comes to Spain shackled to her mother, intrinsically imbalanced due to a gaping paternal void, unable to fill out the space for ‘occupation’ on a form, lost both in the world around her and within her own body. Through the scalding love of another woman, psychosomatic revelation, and axe-blow severings of certain bonds, she emerges from a fiery sexual awakening with an epiphany about identity and bodily ownership.

This is where Cixous comes in, whose landmark feminist writing in 1975 established the poststructuralist tradition founded on the reclamation of identity and emphasis on woman as individual, who she commands to write and use their body as a source of power and inspiration. The choice was between remaining trapped in the body by a language of repression and taboo, or using it itself as a form of communication and expression in a “thrilling era of the body”. For me, this also evokes the impassioned urge to reject the monochrome rigidity of sexual identity in the writings of Eve Sedgwick, tearing down homosocial archetypes and deconstructing the derogatory and archaic binaries embedded in language. Hers is a blistering exposé of the contradictions and knots at the heart of an ancient and suffocating cultural prejudice quite literally sewn into communication itself and so the question of authority when authority is erased. It all comes back to the body, to instinct over logic, as Proust wrote, “the book whose hieroglyphs are not traced by us is the only book that really belongs to us”. So Cixous calls for liberation and reclamation. And so, as Levy quotes at the beginning of the book, “It’s up to you to break the old circuits”.

This is what happens to Sofia in Spain and Athens. The body has been her prison. She has to look after her mother and essentially be her legs, but when they spend all their money in a last ditch effort to find any kind of explanation, more and more evidence accumulates pointing to the fact that it is actually psychosomatic. Sofia is continually stung by medusas in the ocean, the jellyfish who earned their moniker thanks to their serpentine tentacles, which work to almost sting her alive. This is certainly how she feels when she meets the enigmatic German Ingrid Bauer, who wears Romanesque knee-high silver sandals and therapeutically sews stray words onto the vintage clothes she restores, “a snake, a star, a cigar”. Ingrid and Juan from the beach’s injury hut become Sofia’s two lovers, each bringing her different kinds of pleasure and satisfaction, but it is the former who saves her.

“I am walking on the sand and the tide is out. A woman is galloping on her horse across the burning sand of the playa. A tall Andalusian horse. His mane is flaming his hooves are thundering the sea is glittering. She is wearing blue velvet shorts and brown riding boots and she is holding a giant bow and arrow. Her upper arms are muscled, her long hair is braided, she is gripping the horse with her thighs. I can hear her breathing as the arrow flies through the air and enters my heart. I am wounded. I am wounded with desire and I am ready for the ordeal of love.”

The intoxicating power of this relationship is also made even more complex and perplexing by the fact that Ingrid emerges as the ghostly persona who narrates a paragraph or so in the break between most of Sofia’s chapters, essentially as her stalker.

The narrative progresses. Sofia meets Ingrid’s cheating boyfriend Matthew. Her mother is taken off her medications by Gómez and she believes he is trying to kill her. Sofia, emboldened by her relations with Ingrid, steals a fish from the market and forces a local named Pablo to free his dog, who had been tied up since she arrived on the roof howling the neighbourhood down. But it is only when she smashes a Greek vase in the Spanish apartment that she makes up her mind to finally seek out her father, despite the breakage occurring alongside a half-vision of her towering mother and the repressed life she was forced to lead because of him.

On the next page, Sofia is in Athens.

Her 69-year-old father is married to a 29-year-old woman, Alexandra, the mother of his new baby daughter. Alexandra is immediately presented as meek and almost comically meagre, sporting lamb slippers, glasses, and braces that apparently diminish her to a demure caricature, and she seems to think someone half Greek with a degree in anthropology would be unacquainted with the Parthenon. In fact, her entire appearance seems to serve the purpose of proving to Sofia that her own mother is actually “sophisticated”.

This is where events really started jarring with me. I mean, I’m sorry, are we all ok with her just happily adopting “Papa” for this paedophilic old man who abandoned her when she was a child to take up with a woman who was literally born when he was in his 40s?? She just gets in the car with him, all happy families, and starts chatting. Does he show any kind of human empathy or parental concern upon the news that she sleeps above the café she works in, that she’s driving without a license, that her mother is sick? Three guesses. But when the baby coughs, stop the press. He finds time, however, to dryly remark that she “does not have much of an ear for languages”. Why she doesn’t kick the ruddy door off the car and cave his head in with it is beyond me.

Or rather it was, before I read the ending.

Alexandra soon emerges as an assertive economist, confiding over a breastfeeding session how positively geriatric Sofia’s father is: old, weak, forgetful, frail. Sofia imagines the steel of Alexandra’s braces going through her whole body.

Sofia then humours her father with a walk through a nearby park. They bump into a work friend of his, who instantly undresses her with his eyes and hangs on to her hand for a lecherous amount of time. He asks her if she has to get back to work. Her father responds in Greek, “Sofia is a waitress, for the time being”. She is far more tolerant than I would ever be in such a situation, but her thoughts are perfect. “I am other things, too. I have a first-class degree and a master’s. I am pulsating with shifting sexualities. I am sex on tanned legs in suede platform sandals. I am urban and educated and currently godless.” Later she walks to the Acropolis and imagines the ancient river Eridanos flowing far beneath the asphalt where slave women used to fill jars of water to carry on their heads.

Back at her father’s flat she witnesses the ritualistic way Alexandra must light his cigarette for him, like a child-slave locked in this repressive relationship which she tolerates because she never had a father. Sofia thinks of Ingrid and the sun-yellow top Ingrid gave her with the word ‘beloved’ sewn into the collar. She imagines the lives of the enslaved women of ancient Athens, the situations they were trapped in, the wailing grief they were required to express at funerals. “My problem is that I want to smoke the cigar and for someone else to light it. I want to blow out smoke. Like a volcano. Like a monster. I want to fume. I do not want to be the girl whose job it is to wail in a high-pitched voice at funerals. A snake. A star. A cigar.”

And this is when she realises she had misread the word Ingrid had sewn into the top all along, which she later finds out was done so while Ingrid was thinking of her own sister whose brain damage she had been responsible for.

“It was not Beloved. I had invented a word that was not there. Beheaded. It was Beheaded.”

It is a terrifically arresting moment, for this book is full of beheadings. From the snake that Ingrid destroys in the dark with one clean cut to the shattered vase, things sever, smash, slice, separate irrevocably. Nowhere is this more symphonic than in her parental relationships. Maternal love and lost mothers suffuse every page. Sofia, delirious, sees her mother rise above her amidst the shards of the Greek vase and is swept away by the full force of feeling at the thought of the life she had been shackled to, the lives of abused and abandoned women throughout history who were seen as no more than “a vessel to impregnate”. While her mother is a relentless burden that drains her and breaks her, she is bound to her by a bond she continually refers to as a love that cuts as deep as an axe. Axes and cuts proliferate wherever human bonds are raised, as well as in the chapter headings.

The relationship with her father ends with her magisterial appropriation of his power over her in a clinical cut that sees him reduced to a grovelling memory. After the storm of their final confrontation, she is an ice queen in the heat and haze of their final meeting. He makes as though to finally offer reparations, grandiosely says so, and then proceeds to give her a ten euro note, and that’s it. She immediately gives it to a woman who comes into the café begging for money, but keeps the napkin flower he makes and offers to her with the meekness he has spent so long reducing others to. She reclaims her power, and leaves forever. And that was cathartic as all hell. Thank you, Deborah Levy.

The tangled forces of desire and true Love, however, are dealt a messy axe blow that slips around in the fluid things, in the ocean and its waters, in sexuality, in Sofia’s sand boundaries. Indeed in the heat of her sororal revelation, Ingrid rushes at Sofia and tries to drown her, while Sofia’s rage becomes medusa toxin. This subsides as quickly as it surged up in the waves, and Sofia goes to Ingrid’s house where again reality is called into question and she asks, “what is myth? That is a big question. It would be true to say I was probably obsessed with it.” Myth and memory are the boundaries between them, and like Gómez’s daughter, Nurse “Sunshine”, tells Sofia, her boundaries are sand.

In the crescendo of the last thirty or so pages, her mother resolves to have her legs severed. Sofia thinks again, as she did at the very beginning of the book, of a verse from an old rhyme she had once learned, which turns out to be from 1899 ‘Antigonish’ by William Hughes Mearns: “As I was going up the stair / I met a man who wasn’t there. / He wasn’t there again today / I wish, I wish he’d stay away.” This spectre morphs from her father into her mother’s illness. The amputation resolve is the final betrayal and she screams at Gómez in an atmospheric authorial apostrophe, “IT’S NOT REAL”.

But was any of it real? Ambiguity is knotted into the very language, especially when we learn that she does actually speak Greek after all in a poignant moment with her mother, who had taught her how when she was a child. So how much of her narrative is really reliable, were Ingrid’s visits real, or was she a figment, who was watching whom in the little inter-chapter observations, given they have the exact same hand-tattoo-on-breast dream word for word at one point, or was it really Sofia who was having a psychotic episode all along, the one that will bring her liberation and insight? I love how all these questions are raised but not explicitly answered: “I no longer want to know what anything means… History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver.”

For Sofia and Ingrid, Hemingway’s aphorism runs particularly true. They do become stronger at the broken places, namely through reconciling themselves with each other’s tempestuous flaws. This love shores up the void within Sofia. “I am overflowing like coffee leaking from a paper cup. I wonder, shall I make myself smaller? Do I have enough space on Earth to make myself less?” And so, she realises the intensity of her own freedom after an entire novel preoccupied by the repressed freedom of others.

Her obsession with trapped things is as academic as it is emotional: Pablo’s dog, Gómez’s stuffed monkey, the medusas in the net, the toxin in the stings, the chickens dying in the heat, the dead fish at market, even memory itself, ultimate captor of the past. But buried deepest within inaccessible prisons are the trapped women, dominated by her mother and Alexandra: “I was flesh thirst desire dust blood lips cracking feet blistered knees skinned hips bruised, but I was so happy not to be napping on a sofa under a blanket with an older man by my side and a baby on my lap.” Break the old circuits indeed.

And so it comes back to mothers.

The most defining scene of the novel, for me, was undoubtedly when she observes her mother on the beach doing something impossible. After swimming far out into the medusas, Sofia turns in the water to see a figure walking across the sand, gliding with the relaxed and liberated air of assured solitude, graceful and unencumbered and free. And so their fates decouple like two carriages on a railway as Sofia is finally able to leave her mother behind. After a scene of virulent emotional violence when she leaves her mother in the middle of a road in her wheelchair and flees, believing for several hours she has murdered her until she finds her back at the apartment, they have a muted conversation about their forking paths weighted with aching finality, especially when her mother tells her the results of an endoscopy Gómez had arranged. Sofia hears “Sophocles” several times instead of “oesophageal”. Again, ambiguity abounds as the narrative moves into its final cadence, however the lasting feeling is one of acceptance and resolution, despite the inevitable parting.

I loved this book.

Sofia’s journey from trapped to liberated, lost to empowered, unsatisfied to blissfully awakened, is irresistible to anyone who has ever been stuck in limbo, locked into a situation which seems impassable in every direction. And, my gods, is it parentally cathartic. The words on these pages had me aching and burning in equal measure in an intensely visceral toxin-purging release.

It’s interesting comparing it to its companions on the 2016 Booker shortlist. Perhaps its closest parallel was in Moshfegh’s Eileen, however, rather than gratuitously and purposelessly destructive, or regressively generalising like Szalay’s entry, Levy paints an achingly ordinary and human cast of characters in a breathtaking heat haze of faltered fates and familial decay.

She repeatedly talks about the “milk of human kindness”, doing things to your disadvantage for the advantage of others. Her parents lived by the opposite philosophy, and it crippled her until she met Ingrid and found her release.

Silence and secrecy and sight. Occlusions and hidden selves. The story evokes a gorgeous moment in Waugh’s fraught, beguiling Brideshead Revisited, when protagonist Charles feels himself enter an enchanted secret garden of self-discovery when he meets the Ingrid-like Sebastian. Enchanted is definitely the word.

Break the old circuits.

If I were to choose one poem to embody the whole novel, how I envision it and how it feels, it would undoubtedly be Plath’s Ariel. That’s my lasting impression, and that is why I love it.

Sofia is the arrow flying free into the cauldron of morning.