Hot Milk
Hot Milk book cover

Hot Milk

Paperback – May 9, 2017

by
Price
$11.99
Format
Paperback
Pages
240
Publisher
Bloomsbury USA
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-1620406700
Dimensions
5.5 x 0.65 x 8.2 inches
Weight
8.8 ounces

Description

"Gorgeous . . . What makes the book so good is Ms. Levy’s great imagination, the poetry of her language, her way of finding the wonder in the everyday, of saying a lot with a little, of moving gracefully among pathos, danger and humor and of providing a character as interesting and surprising as Sofia. It’s a pleasure to be inside Sofia’s insightful, questioning mind." - The New York Times "Levy has spun a web of violent beauty and poetical ennui . . . the book exerts a seductive, arcane power, rather like a deck of tarot cards, every page seething with lavish, cryptic innuendo." - The New York Times Book Review "In Levy’s evocative novel, dense with symbolism, a woman struggles against her hypochondriacal mother to achieve her own identity." - T he New York Times Book Review, “100 Notable Books of 2016” "Against fertile seaside backdrops, Sofia, seeking a robust, global meaning for femininity and motherhood, becomes increasingly bold herself." - The New Yorker "A powerful novel of the interior life, which Levy creates with a vividness that recalls Virginia Woolf . . . Transfixing." - Erica Wagner, The Guardian "The novel's eerie atmosphere and sibylline turns of phrase have made Hot Milk the bettor's favorite for this year's Man Booker Prize . . . Its moody spell and haunted imagery pull you in." - Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal "Levy's work has developed a loyal following, and she has emerged as one of England's best-loved authors . . . She has reached the apogee of mainstream recognition with two appearances on the Man Booker Prize shortlist, one for Swimming Home in 2012, and another in 2016 for Hot Milk . . . Both works retain traces of Levy's early rawness, but they go in for a more muted lyricism. Their oddity is subtle and slow to surface. Reading them is like walking off into the fog and getting lost there . . . The way we should read Levy: as a call to disorientation, and a reminder that when we return from vacation we will always find the old house altered, the windows a little wider, and our tired lives at least a little different." - The Nation "Exquisite prose . . . Hot Milk is perfectly crafted, a dream-narrative so mesmerising that reading it is to be under a spell. Reaching the end is like finding a piece of glass on the beach, shaped into a sphere by the sea, that can be held up and looked into like a glass-eye and kept, in secret, to be looked at again and again." - Suzanne Joinson, The Independent "Levy’s language is precise. The absurdities of her style seem scattershot at first, but yield a larger pattern: a commentary on debt and personal responsibility, family ties and independence." - Washington Post "Hot Milk is a complicated, gorgeous work." - Marie Claire "Highbrow/Brilliant. [An] intensely interior but highly charged new novel about family, hypochondria, Spain, Greece, and all kinds of sex." - New York Magazine, Approval Matrix "Economical, fluid, evocative of sex and mythology . . . . Young Sofia . . . drop[s] beautiful bombs of truth." - New York Magazine’s Vulture blog "A singular read . . . Levy has crafted a great character in Sofia, and witnessing a pivotal moment in her life is a pleasure." - starred and boxed review, Publishers Weekly "Scintillating, provocative . . . Levy combines intellect and empathy to impressively modern effect." - starred review, Kirkus Reviews "Great lush writing [and] luxuriation in place. No writer infuses the landscape, urban or rural, with as much meaning and monstrosity as Levy . . . Unmissable." - Eimear McBride, The New Statesman "An unsettling, poetic novel." - The Atlantic, “The Best Books We Read in 2016” "Among the questions posed in this heady new novel: Is Sofia’s mother, Rose, sick or a hypochondriac who’s feverish for attention? And more important, can the frustrated Sofia break the chains of familial devotion and live for herself?" - O, the Oprah Magazine "A captivating demonstration of why Levy is one of the few necessary novelists writing in Britain today. This is the poetry and playfulness of her prose . . . More important, Levy grapples with and presents the complex psychology and multiple facets of her female characters like few others, which makes the recent reappraisal of her life’s work all the more welcome." - The Forward "A beguiling tale of myths and identity . . . provocative . . . The difficult, ambivalent, precious mother-daughter relationship forms the core of this beautiful, clever novel." - Michele Roberts, The Independent Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, broadcast on the BBC, and widely translated. The author of highly praised novels, including The Man Who Saw Everything (longlisted for the Booker Prize), Hot Milk and Swimming Home (both Man Booker Prize finalists), The Unloved, and Billy and Girl, the acclaimed story collection Black Vodka , and two parts of her working autobiography, Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living , she lives in London. Levy is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

Features & Highlights

  • A
  • New York Times
  • Notable Book of the Year.
  • Shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize,
  • Hot Milk
  • moves "gracefully among pathos, danger, and humor” (
  • The New York Times
  • ).
  • I have been sleuthing my mother's symptoms for as long as I can remember. If I see myself as an unwilling detective with a desire for justice, is her illness an unsolved crime? If so, who is the villain and who is the victim?
  • Sofia, a young anthropologist, has spent much of her life trying to solve the mystery of her mother's unexplainable illness. She is frustrated with Rose and her constant complaints, but utterly relieved to be called to abandon her own disappointing fledgling adult life. She and her mother travel to the searing, arid coast of southern Spain to see a famous consultant--their very last chance--in the hope that he might cure her unpredictable limb paralysis.But Dr. Gomez has strange methods that seem to have little to do with physical medicine, and as the treatment progresses, Sofia's mother's illness becomes increasingly baffling. Sofia's role as detective--tracking her mother's symptoms in an attempt to find the secret motivation for her pain--deepens as she discovers her own desires in this transient desert community.
  • Hot Milk
  • is a profound exploration of the sting of sexuality, of unspoken female rage, of myth and modernity, the lure of hypochondria and big pharma, and, above all, the value of experimenting with life; of being curious, bewildered, and vitally alive to the world.

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
30%
(1.2K)
★★★★
20%
(778)
★★★
15%
(584)
★★
7%
(272)
★
28%
(1.1K)

Most Helpful Reviews

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Intriguing read

Deborah Levy's a recent discovery for me, what a talent! I'm working my way through her books and have not been disappointed by any. Hot Milk is a slim novel but it packs a punch. There's so much to it, and Levy inhabits the psyche of a lost 20 something with remarkable alacrity. I won't repeat the story, but the writing is exquisite - sharp but elusive, sometimes ironic and Levy has much to say about human frailty and the ties that bind us. A vague air of menace hovers over the story, encouraging the reader to find out what's really going on between the two main characters.
3 people found this helpful
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What happened anyway?

My book club read this novel this month and only one of our members actually liked the book. We were all surprised because it had received such excellent reviews, including Kirkus. There were amusing passages, strange passages, too much symbolism (one of our members remarked that Hawthorne would have loved it!), Brechtian like scenes, and then the ending which leaves the reader in the dark. Was the Mother really sick after all?
2 people found this helpful
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Different, and worth it for the poetry and myth

A young woman is chained to her sick mother, whose mysterious, undefined and variable illness has led them both to an eccentric alternative doctor in the desert and deserted south coast of Spain. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016, this was unlike anything I’d read before. The nearest I can get to describing it is a modern-day Hamlet, where the centre of the woman’s protagonist is whether she is free to live her life if she remains a carer for her difficult, negative, sick mother.

(Although the book is good, I do have to protest at this point at the familiar trope of the poor carer trapped in caring for the annoying invalid, who may or may not be faking her illness. Our media right now is saturated with two narratives about disabled people: 1) that those with fluctuating or ‘invisible’ illness are no doubt fakers, and 2) disabled people are burdens on others. It would be lovely for those of us who live with fluctuating illnesses to have disabled fictional characters who reflected the lived experience of most of us with disabilities – friendly, hardworking and resilient – instead of getting shunted into these categories).

The writing style is its main selling point: halfway to poetry, each short sentence is visually evocative and full of literary allusions. It has a dreamlike quality – strange, colourful, lucid scenes, with a background of stream of consciousness Woolf-esque inner monologue. You can smell the salt on the sea, the fish guts in the market, the sweat on her skin.

There’s not much of a plot, and none of the characters are particularly likeable. But it reads like a work of art. It does a lot with few words: exploring the power and weakness of women, the parent-child relationship and the ways we chain ourselves to each other, doomed love and the different ways we live in fantasies of our own making. Be warned: our book club was split, with many finding it plotless, slow and just plain weird.

But if you are a lover of poetry, alert to the classical allusions, the interplay of myth and psychology, this is a rich and rewarding read – and so different from anything else that it’s definitely worth your time. Highly recommended.

*I received a review copy and this is my honest review*
2 people found this helpful
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though painful, is as nothing to the emotional humiliation she ...

Levy, Deborah. Hot Milk.

Deborah Levy’s story of the final ‘chapter in the history of my mother’s legs’ is set in the desert of southern Spain, where Sofia Papastergiadis goes to the Gómez clinic in a desperate attempt to find treatment for Rose, her mother. The book’s simple surface of a holiday adventure masks the complexity of this coming-of-age novel in which a 23 year-old girl, whose life has been devoted to studying anthropology, meets sundry suitors of both sexes who seem to offer her protection from human and natural predators, called medusas. The physical threat, though painful, is as nothing to the emotional humiliation she suffers as an outsider, a virtual child long abandoned by her Greek father. Many clashes of purpose and temperament encourage Sofia’to flee the desert to meet her long-lost father in Athens.

Her greeting and her request for funds to complete her doctorate are repulsed, however, for the successful banker has not only found God, but established himself as an entrepreneur and settled down with his new young wife and baby. Meanwhile, during her absence, Rose has deteriorated and Dr Gómez is replaced.

The novel is heavily invested with symbols, beginning with the smashed computer screen which contains Sofia’s life and opinions and ending with her deliberate smashing of a precious Greek vase. Throughout we have the ambivalent jelly fish of which there is a glut, suggesting necessary physical and mental suffering as well as healing, the embroidered letters from her friend’s gift of a sweater, in which the term ‘Beheaded’ is initially misconstrued by Sofia as ‘Beloved.’ Finally, the girl’s repeated failure at driving tests, as opposed to her mother’s surprising recovery of skills when needed, which says much about their respective characters. I am sure that the title ‘Hot Milk’suggests more than the traditional English comforting nightly beverage, especially in a land where water is desperately short and a perpetual problem to Rose, the permanent invalid. But the book is an easy and thoughtful read nevertheless and well worth its place on the Booker shortlist.
1 people found this helpful
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Gorgeous, Compelling, and Eerie

I loved the poetic narrative of Sofia and her struggles with loyalty vs rage and self hatred vs hope. What is our debt as daughters to our mothers? When are we allowed to be our own person. Set against the piercing sun of Spain and the stinging jelly fish of the ocean, Sofia swims to shore.
1 people found this helpful
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Novel set in ALMERIA ("..a tableau of happenings..")

Elderly Rose is what might be called a ‘career invalid’. Her incapacity is further exacerbated by Sofia, her daughter, whose cowed demeanour and willingness to subject herself (with forebearance it has to be said) to her mother’s critical demands, only serves to reinforce the situation.

Mother and daughter take out a massive loan from the bank to enable Rose to have treatment at the Gómez Clinic in Almería, run by a golden-toothed quack and an alcohol addicted daughter (Nurse Sunshine), who offer the possibility of a cure for Rose’s immobility. Although Goméz intends to approach her problems from a physical perspective, he is not slow in coming forward with a psychological angle. He soon spots that Rose’s coercive attitude towards her daughter has knocked the psychological stuffing out of her and that Sofia is in just as much need of treatment as Rose.

And thus it is that Sofia comes out of her shell. At the behest of Dr Gómez she steals a sizeable fish, then embarks on amorous encounters and resolves to take herself off to Athens to meet up with her biological father, with whom she has had no contact for several years. It is a blossoming of mind, spirit and body.

The author is extremely good and perceptive at bringing the minutiae of everyday life to the reader. In general I love finding details that add to my knowledge (did you know that the higher the shoe and leg strapping on a Roman soldier’s footwear, the higher his ranking; or that Almería in Arabic means “mirror of the sea”?). But I sense the author maybe had a list of “interesting” things – collated observations and facts – which she wanted to include, and which she randomly fed into the storyline. It all felt a bit arbitrary.

For me, the story was overall too random. I perfectly understand that Sofia is undergoing a blossoming of self awareness and has to work on extricating herself from her mother’s undermining grasp. The storyline felt rather cobbled together, like a spotlight on a stage that keeps moving to different scenes; it is ultimately a contrived concept. Levy picks up the Freudian theme once again, which echoes her earlier book Swimming Home (which I reviewed here, set in the Alpes Maritimes) but again there isn’t enough flesh to really make a lot of sense. Copious references to breasts (as in nurturing mother’s milk/sex etc) doesn’t really work as a shorthand for psychological exploration. Sofia is afflicted with copious Medusa stings when she goes out swimming in the Mediterranean and of course, if you know Freud’s work, these little sea beings are referenced there (but it’s a tenuous link as a decapitated Medusa – actually a woman with a head of snakes – is synonymous with castration, so quite how that fits here, I do not know).

Swimming Home was Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012, Hot Milk was shortlisted for the same prize in 2016, and although the writing in both is lyrical and very readable, there are other books with much richer and complete storylines that truly warrant this kind of accolade. As I said in my review of Swimming Home “This book is a stab at writing a surrealist plot, a tableau of happenings..”, and the same applies to Hot Milk.

Location, however, is wonderfully rendered, it’s hot in Almería (and also on the side trip to Athens) and the cover really reflects the setting. “We are in a lunar landscape. That’s what all the guides say about Almería. Wind-beaten and sun-baked. All the riverbeds are cracked and dry. A blue petrol haze floats above the tattered stalls selling handbags and purple grapes and onions….”
1 people found this helpful
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I was bored

I am not usually much for nonfiction, and this book didn’t change my mind. It didn’t flow well, there seemed to be a lot of inconsistencies that made no sense to me. And she didn’t do her homework on some, albeit, minuscule things, like octopus turning your teeth black with ink, that’s squid, and you don’t grind teeth down to points for veneers, those are crowns. I know that seems petty, but it bothers me. Just my two cents.
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Deborah Levy - one of the best contemporary writers

Read it and find out for yourself.
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Read it!

Fabulous read
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3 stars

3 stars

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