Hot Milk

This is the story of a mother daughter relationship. Mother and daughter, Rose and Sofia embark on a journey to a Spanish clinic in search of a cure for Rose's paralysis, exploring themes of identity, obsession, duty, and the complexities of their relationship. The atmosphere is quite creepy with stinging jelly fish called Medusa's, creepy voyeuristic female acquaintance and a mother who has a fictitious disorder. Both Rose and Sophia are paralysed in their lives. Rose often asks for water but it is never the right water. So why the title Hot Milk? It evokes the charged and unhealthy intimacy of maternal milk, suggesting a bond that can be both nurturing and controlling.

"'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. "

29. Hot Milk by Deborah Levy
published: 2016
format: 218-page paperback
acquired: December
read: Jun 25-29
time reading: 6:01, 1.7 mpp
rating: 4 (maybe 4+ ??)
locations: Almeriá, Spain & Athens, with memories of London and Yorkshire.
about the author: British novelist born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1959.

Among the blurbs in the front of my paperback is this perfect one from [[Lionel Shriver]]: "Deborah Levy conveys an atmosphere of out-of-kilter surreality without ever show more violating the rules of realism."

This book is hyper that, that "out-of-kilter surreality". So much so that, not quite in the mood for constant thought-provoking lines, each word needing attention and warping the meaning, I had to tell myself to have a little patience. And that worked. If thoughtful "out-of-kilter surreality" is a thing, or is it negative capability(?), this book does it masterfully and joyfully.

Sophie, an anthropologist who works in a London coffee shop, is far away from that, showered by the sun in Almería, southern Spain. She is there with her needy single Yorkshire mother, who has mysterious numb feet, to seek treatment with a questionable specialist. The atmosphere is everything here - the sun, the parched landscape, Medusa jellyfish, many playful references to Greek mythology, a newfound experimental inhibition...and the sense that nothing is reliable here. And the carefully crafted lines and odd-associations just keep coming. Combined, it‘s all one step removed, dreamy, uncertain, and, yes, thought-provoking. This is my second terrific book by Levy. I really like how that atmosphere here has hung around beyond the few days it took to read.

2021
https://www.librarything.com/topic/330945#7547135 show less

I wasn't sure what this book was going to be about, and now I've read I'm not even sure I can explain it well.

At a plot level, Sophie is a young woman spending the summer months in Almeria in Spain caring for her mother whilst they try to get a diagnosis for a mystery psychosomatic condition that affects her ability to walk. However, this novel is really about emotion, and the change that being amongst these new surroundings and unexpected people brings.

This novel really worked for me. Levy establishes not only an acute sense of place, but also manages to evoke so well the heightened senses that Sophie experiences from her physical and emotional environment. It's a melting pot of inescapable heat, of noise (from the dog at the diving show more school that's perpetually chained up), of pain (from repetitive jelly fish stings), of complex sensuality and of rising frustration from being carer to a mother who's determined to suffer and not find any enjoyment of life. The pressure from these elements steadily increases until they result in a new emergence in Sophie, one where she is bolder in calling out those in her life for what they really are, and where she seeks to experience without needing to understand or to know where any of it is heading.

I think an onslaught on the senses is very difficult to convey in a novel, but Levy nails it in Hot Milk. I know some people think this is a hugely overrated novel, but I think it's for this exact achievement that it has earned its plaudits. There was a tinge of Anita Brookner for me in this novel, but with more light at the end of the tunnel than Brookner normally allows.

A great read. I felt the movement from Almeria to Athens for a short part of the novel broke the spell a little, so for that I'm taking away half a star, but hugely enjoyably otherwise.

4.5 stars - powerfully emotive. show less

I had such high hopes for this one. I really wanted to like it based, if nothing else, on the opinions of people whom I respect. Once again, I find myself deviating from the mainstream. Quelle surprise!

Hot Milk Bleh. What a mess!

The dreamlike quality of which many reviewers rave is certainly present ... but when they see Elysian fields, I am reminded of David Lynch's dwarf, muttering in the darkness: something about convenience stores and damaged limbs. (Sound familiar?)

Here's a link

It makes as much sense. In fact, Lynch makes more sense, because eventually the dream is revelatory. Hot Milk is simply a derivative, and a monstrosity. OK, whoa on the hyperbole. But, at the very least, it's a monstrous let-down.

It didn't take long for show more disappointment to set in, as you will see. It begins in the second paragraph of the first chapter, so it took Levy all of 66 words (not counting title and chapter headings) to disappoint me. A laptop is dropped. The screen is shattered. Broken laptop equals broken life. Oh, please. Please release me from this self-indulging, narcissistic little twerp. (The thought that came into my head as I read Levy's words.) It didn't get better. I almost dismissed it then and there to move on to the next Booker-hopeful. But no, I had to carry on.

By page 15, Levy had left me more than a little punch-drunk with her stupefying analogies. Nurse Sunshine, the clinician's daughter, who doubles as a physiotherapist and archivist (?) of people's symptoms mumbles something which is also dwarf-worthy. And then ...

"Thank you, Nurse Sunshine," he said to the nurse, as if it were normal for an eminent doctor who specialized in musculoskeletal conditions to name his staff after the weather. She was still holding the door open, as if her thoughts had wandered off to roam on the Sierra Nevada.

???

What does that even mean? My own thoughts, thus stultified, soon wandered off to roam on the Sierra Nevada as well, in vain pursuit of ... I know not what.

I had been defeated at page 15.

Knowing I'd reached the height of absurdity, I knew what to expect, so it wasn't quite as painful as you might imagine to reach the end of it all.

Mostly, I had the urge to slap Sofia every time she spoke, or appeared, and to pitch her mother over some cliff or other. Through the entire length of the novel, Sofia variously: bemoaned her fate, whined, groused, snivelled, mewled and moaned. Her mother did the same, except louder.

If there was ever a relationship made in hell, with no hope of ransom, this is it: Sofia-and-Rose, locked in an eternal death-grip of antagonism and bitterness which neither has the intention of ever loosening, let alone releasing, so deep-seated is their mutual loathing. (These two babes really hate each other -- and they want to go on hating each other, despite the anemic resolution that is offered at the end of the novel.) The irony here: the only person that they don't blame is the one who IS to blame -- the one who abandoned them both and, in effect, sponsored this mother-daughter hate-fest -- but who remains apart, and forever an enigma, like Zeus in his celestial palace.

This unresolved aspect of the novel is an irritant, but not half the annoyance of having to deal with two novels in one, both of which are left open-ended.

Half way through this dark wood, the mother-daughter hate-fest takes a respite and becomes a treatise on European failed economics, with .. you guessed it ... Greece at its centre. The Greeks may be old and doddering and set in their ways, but they sure know how to live a lusty life at everyone else's expense, damned be the consequences. A facile analysis, but there it is.

There are more head-spinning scenarios within this novel then there were in the Exorcist. (The original 1973 version with Linda Blair.)

Sofia's failure to have her father meet his responsibilities becomes an out-and-out lecture on the reasons European economics are such a red hot magma mess. Apparently, it's the rest of the world's fault that Greece cannot/does not meet its obligations: the rest of the world is too weak and too simpering to hold Greece's feet to the fire. (This is lactose intolerance at its height.)

With all issues unresolved, we are catapulted back into Mommy Dearest and Terms of Endearment, rolled into one. Facile, artful solutions abound in this novel.

Bracketed as the whole mess is by a Greek Chorus that shows up at the beginning of each chapter, Levy has tried her best to tell us this is a Greek tragedy of epic proportions, but even these obvious hammer-blows to the side of the skull cannot turn mud into myth nor save it from being an insipid and wearisome novel.

If this is Booker-worthy, then I'll drink my hot milk, detestable testament of my youth, without complaint. show less

Sofia Papastergiadis cannot speak Greek. Her Greek father abandoned her English mother when she was a child. She hasn’t seen him since she was 14. Instead, her whole life has been about her mother, Rose, who initially kept the wolf from their door but has for many years now suffered from an inexplicable ailment. Rose can’t walk. Mostly. Most of the time. And though Rose constantly asks for water, Sofia seems to be always bringing her the wrong kind. Sofia doesn’t just bring Rose water. She does everything for her. She is, she thinks, her mother’s legs. But all of that might change. Having exhausted the resources and patience of the NHS, Rose has mortgaged their house in order to raise the fee for a private clinic on the south of show more Spain. Here she will either discover what ails her, or give up her quest. Meanwhile, Sofia is undergoing her own crisis of identity. With a suspended Ph.D. dissertation in Anthropology on the subject of cultural memory lurking in her shattered laptop, Sofia has been making ends meet by working at an artisan coffee shop in London, living in the spare room above the store. It’s time to bring about a bit of metamorphosis.

Deborah Levy’s story begins straightforwardly with a broken laptop screen and a painful sting from a jellyfish, or medusa in Spanish. Sofia is seemingly set upon by the elements, bad luck, and aggressively painful animal life. But very quickly we realize that Sofia’s take on things might be skewed. She sees with the eyes of an anthropologist, but also in the mythic mode, perhaps harkening back to her Greek roots. Will Ingrid, the steamy seamstress, or Juan, from the healing hut, activate her desire or snuff it out? And what’s up with this strange clinic that Rose is going to where the doctor is becoming less and less interested in her lack of mobility? Everything begins to fold in on itself until nothing is merely what it is. It’s a brilliant metaphor for the involutions of the inner life. And it makes reading this novel a real treat.

Recommended. show less

What an intoxicating, feverish, atmospheric, hypnotic, heady mix of heat and desire and physicality and sexuality and symbolism.

I was completely beguiled by this marvelously bizarre sensual world, where all the characters behave as if every interaction, every gesture, every scene is full of meaning, where they all talk like they are about to launch into a long and introspective monologue any second, the dialogues technically correct but unnaturally robotic, it shouldn't work, yet, together, everything feels right, exactly the way it should be.

A novel to melt into.

We put on our dresses and rings and adjusted our earrings brushed our hair and left the room The white soft sheets with their hundreds of threads, sewing machines and fabrics, the thick walls and wooden beams, the fig bread, the bottle of aromatic wine, and a blue snake lying in two parts, our wet footprints on the stone floor and the shower, still dripping.

What I really loved about Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk was the detailed descriptions of every day objects and movements as she describes transient life in a beachside town in Spain.

The main character Sophia is on a short stay in a small Mediterranean resort near Almería with her hypochondriac mother Rose. They are on holiday from their home in London in search of a cure for Rose by an show more enigmatic doctor, Gómez. Sophia has short affairs with various lovers as she journeys to “be brave”.

Levy’s description of the beach town is so real that if you are reading this book alone it feels as if you are actually there there with Sophie and all her fears. With the ocupi or Medusa’s as Sophia imagines them, the pebbled sand, the beach and lovers that she escapes to.

Sophia is constantly being stung. Physically by the ocupi and psychologically by her dependent mother and her various lovers. There is not a lot of plot although there is some mystery as to the legitimacy of Gómez who is treating the mother for her imagined illnesses, and the sincerity of Sophia’s girlfriend lover Ingrid.

But lest you see Sophia as her mother’s keeper and as a willing victim of her lovers and ocupi, she is also very funny. Here she is meeting her father‘s new young wife in Greece. She notices her shoes, soft with fluffy lambs and rolling white eyes on the toes.

Alexandra saw me staring at her feet and she laughed. “They are comforting. I paid just less than €70 for them. Really they are slippers for inside, but they have sturdy rubber soles so I can wear them outside.” My father‘s new bride-child wore braces and animal shoes . My eyes started to roam around her, just in case I discovered ladybird earrings or a ring with a smiley face.

I thoroughly enjoyed Hot Milk and highly recommended it.

2025
https://www.librarything.com/topic/372420#9003676 show less