Hot Milk

By Deborah Levy

(Man Booker Shortlist 2016)

“’Sofia is a waitress, for the time being,’ my father said in Greek.
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.”

25-year-old Sofia is an anthropologist working in an artisan café. Her mother Rose has been suffering with unidentifiable leg problems for many years, and Sofia has become her carer. Theirs is a tense relationship. Both Sofia and Rose have just arrived on the Spanish coast to see an expensive doctor.

In the Spanish sunshine, on a jellyfish infested beach, Sofia is stung in more ways than one. The novel is incredibly sensual: The tang of sweat on a body, the sting of a jellyfish on the skin. Desire is tangible; an excuse to be a wilful and a reason to surrender.

“The Kiss. We don’t talk about it but it’s there in the coconut ice cream we are making together. It’s there in the space between us as Ingrid scrapes the seeds from a vanilla pod with her penknife. It’s lurking in the long eyelids and the egg yolks and cream and it’s written in blue silken thread with the needle that is Ingrid’s mind.”

The language is mesmerizing. The imagery Levy uses is unusual and enigmatic, as are her characters.

Everyone we encounter is an enigma. As an anthropologist, Sofia cannot help but be fascinated by them. Her subtle observation of others demystifies and beatifies these people, while respecting that full understanding is not always possible or necessary. It is also in this way that Sofia reaches revelations of her own.