AUGUST BLUE, by Deborah LevyIn the work of Deborah Levy, certain elements recur in ever new arrangements: swimming, seafood, bees and silence; brokenness and recovery; the patriarchy. In Levy’s latest novel, “August Blue,” it is musical recomposition that becomes the overt, and sometimes overly self-conscious, metaphor for female revolt and reinvention. For a little over two minutes, she went off script, playing music that came to her unbidden, before walking offstage. At a flea market in Athens, this other woman snapped up two mechanical dancing horses that the pianist also wanted. While she chases what may be hallucinatory glimpses of the doppelgänger across Europe, she takes to wearing the trilby hat the mystery woman dropped at the market.

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Persons: Deborah Levy, Booker, “, Levy’s, unemployable Locations: British, Vienna, Athens, London, Paris, Sardinia, Greece, Europe