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Swimming Home

3.23 of 5 stars 3.23 · rating details · 2,530 ratings · 466 reviews

Short-listed for the 2012 Man Booker Prize. With an Introduction by Tom McCarthy, author of C. As he arrives with his family at the villa in the hills above Nice, Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their hol...more

Paperback, 157 pages

Published October 16th 2012 by Bloomsbury USA (first published 2011)

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Oct 17, 2012 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literary-fiction, contemporary, reread, favourites, 2011

A group of tourists holidaying in the French Riviera arrive at their summer villa only to find something floating in the swimming pool. One of them thinks it’s a bear, but it turns out to be a very naked stranger. The woman Kitty, having nowhere else to go, joins the group and ends up being a big disruption to the group in this deeply psychology dark novel.

Ok, I’ll admit that the main reason I decided to read this book was because it was short listed for the Man Booker award but let’s face it, a...more

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Oct 07, 2012 Elaine rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012

I really wanted to love this book, and I did love Levy's writing, her prose is masterful, conveying character, setting, insight in small spare beautifully crafted paragraphs. The entire book is quite lean -- a week of time, briefly, surgically told -- and yet there are 9 distinct, well drawn characters, each with backstory, plot and motivation. Levy's craftsmanship is rich.

The problem is that the book is cold at the core. The oddly comforting epilogue rings false in a book that so limpidly depic...more

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Aug 22, 2012 MJ Nicholls rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels, sassysassenachs, tortured-artists, distaff

This queer, disquieting novel blends a dark, surreal Topor-topos with a Hollywood noir of forties vintage. Taking place in 1994 over a week in a French holiday resort, the novel centres around stuttering botanist and exhibitionist depressive Kitty Finch and her interaction with a ragbag of unlikeable snobs, poets and snotty brats. Like her 1995 book The Unloved, Levy creates an unpleasant world with little empathy, where language is the only refuge, where the icy shimmer of the exacting prose ke...more

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Sep 23, 2012 Agbonmire Ifeh rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have read a couple of books on depression, they come out pretty heavy and I feel the bell jar come over my head literally and I quit reading. But, this book is remarkably different. Depression is tackled in a witty, funny tone and this makes the book incandescent. Years ago when I was an active chess player I once said to someone that people outside see better than the people who are playing. The dude was watching the game and yammering about missed chances, mistakes and all and got on my ner...more

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Sep 26, 2012 Bonnie rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult, booker, literary-fiction, arcs-read, edelweiss-netgalley

Swimming Home was kindly provided to me by Netgalley for Bloomsbury USA.

"Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely."

After spotting this on Netgalley I found myself intrigued but ultimately willing to wait for it to be published. A few days later the Shortlist for the 2012 Man Book Prize was announced and Swimming Home was included, so I decided it was fate that I stumbled upon this book yet again so I went ahead and snagged it.

Kitty, botanist, po...more Swimming Home was kindly provided to me by Netgalley for Bloomsbury USA.

"Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely."

After spotting this on Netgalley I found myself intrigued but ultimately willing to wait for it to be published. A few days later the Shortlist for the 2012 Man Book Prize was announced and Swimming Home was included, so I decided it was fate that I stumbled upon this book yet again so I went ahead and snagged it.

Kitty, botanist, poet, and part-time exhibitionist suffering from depression, travels to France to meet poet Joe Jacobs who she insists she has a connection with. His wife, Isabel, inevitably gets invited to stay with him and his family and the couple that traveled with them. Isabel Jacobs, a war correspondent, is married to Joe; however, their marriage is in shambles and is obvious to anyone in their proximate vicinity. It is unclear to everyone why Isabel would allow such a girl as Kitty to stay with them, especially considering her obvious fascination with Joe.

"When Kitty Finch took her hand off the steering wheel and told him she loved him, he no longer knew if she was threatening him or having a conversation."

Swimming Home is a short yet trying read that could almost be considered a novella or even a vignette; a snapshot of that fateful week in France. The writing was intermittently lovely but I found myself unclear as to where the story was going. I can't help but feel I'm lacking in something by not being able to appreciate these 'literary masterpieces' as they should be. Comments were made by the judges of the Booker Prize this year that they're steering clear of mainstream books and that readability isn't high on their list of importance. Sir Peter Stothard was quoted as saying: “I felt very, very strongly that I wanted to avoid that thing where people say, ‘Wow, I loved it, it’s terrific’.” Suffice it to say, I did not finish this book and say, "Wow, I loved it, it's terrific," so I guess they got something right. I think it's safe to say I won't be venturing into anything else this man considers 'literary masterpieces', they're simply not for me.(less)

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Oct 19, 2012 Andrew Dehany rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Andrew Gallix refers to Deborah Levy as “a true daytime insomniac” (Guardian); whatever that means, it seems to colourfully capture Levy’s performance in this well-observed and protean novel. Its epigram is drawn from the Surrealist Manifesto and serves as an ironic commentary on the action, whereby “Each morning in every family, men, women and children [these familiar social categories are all represented discretely in this middle-class-family-novel-gone-thru-the-looking-glass], if they have no...more

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Nov 27, 2012 Wendy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012-reads, netgalley, ebook

Simple, yet complicated, Swimming Home is a short novel of how depression can change a family without them even realizing it.

This is a super short novel about depression. It features an eclectic group of people who have gathered together in a vacation villa in France.

Because it's so short we aren't privy to much background information about the characters. This minimalistic writing leaves it to our imagination and forces us to see what is happening in the present right in front of us.

Each of the...more

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Oct 20, 2012 Diane S. rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

3.5 Not quite sure what to make of this little gem of a book. A holiday, characters that are on course for a terrific crash of some sort, the insidious nature of depression all meet in this tightly structured, brilliantly worded novel. Every word, every scene means something, nothing is wasted. Strange but rather brilliant at the same time. Didn't quite manage to like it, but did admire it and the ending was not at all was I thought it was going to be. The tension in the novel is palpable and at...more

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Apr 30, 2013 Austin Doyle rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A fluid, easy read, Swimming Home starts as your typical English couples with daughter vacationing abroad, but end up in haunting, mysterious place, and where the path leads is very hard to guess. A philandering, famous poet, his war-correspondent wife (who's well aware of his affairs) and 14 year old, beautiful and pleasantly foul mouthed daughter, along with the war-correspondent's 6'3" best friend from school and her gun obsessed, overweight husband (who are secretly broke)all travel to the p...more

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Apr 14, 2013 Agnes Benis rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. The plot of the book is stated briefly at the beginning. Two couples rent a villa in the South of France. An intruder is discovered swimming nude in the pool. She is invited to stay. That's it. Characters in the story are: Joe Jacobs, famous poet; his wife Isabel is a war correspondent; Mitchell and Laura have a business selling crafts and antique guns; Nina is the Jacobs' 14 year old daughter; Kitty Finch is the young intruder; Claude owns the local cafe and is supposed to look like Mick jagger...more The plot of the book is stated briefly at the beginning. Two couples rent a villa in the South of France. An intruder is discovered swimming nude in the pool. She is invited to stay. That's it. Characters in the story are: Joe Jacobs, famous poet; his wife Isabel is a war correspondent; Mitchell and Laura have a business selling crafts and antique guns; Nina is the Jacobs' 14 year old daughter; Kitty Finch is the young intruder; Claude owns the local cafe and is supposed to look like Mick jagger; Jurgen is the caretaker of the villa, but does little caretaking except of Kitty because he is stoned most of the time; Dr. Sheridan, psychiatrist, spies on everyone from her hillside home.

The story shifts in time and is mainly about the thoughts and feelings of all the characters.

In the past Dr. Sheridan rescued Kitty whom she found nude (again) near the beach. She took her to a mental hospital where she was a patient for a considerable time and underwent shock treatments. Kitty is mentally mad and one of the most astounding parts of the book is the author's rendering of Kitty's thoughts. They are so spot-on that it is like a lesson on deranged thinking, confusion, etc. Kitty is also very angry at Dr. Sheridan for the hospital stay. Kitty has written a poem and has stalked Joe to the South of France. She wants him to read her poem.

Joe is a philanderer and fights against his attraction to Kitty. Joe has raised Nina as his wife, the war correspondent, was often away on assignment. She may have invited Kitty to stay in order to stage an affair that would allow her to break up her marriage. (How did a war correspondent accustomed to death and horror match up with a poet, sensitive feelings etc.?) Nina is naturally closer to her father as her mother was largely absent. Apparently the mother has not thought through that Nina would choose her father in a divorce.

Nina is very cognizant of her parents' relationship and believes they do not even like each other, let alone love. Joe does love them but is haunted by his childhood when he was left in a forest in Poland by his father in order to avoid the Nazis. Joe is told by his father that he is never to come home.

The ending of the book is shocking.

I have some questions: Why is Kitty naked alot of the time? Simply to show her vulnerability or something else?

What does the raining poem mean? Deep sadness? Tears? Nina "talks" with her father on the bus when it is raining. She says she knows her daughter will have to dream herself in and out of life, but life must always win.

Why did Kitty stutter at times?

I think the book is a study of depression (Kitty and Joe). In spite of this, there are some funny lines. Kitty did her best to confront or act out her depression, to cry for help. Joe repressed his and eventually committed suicide.

How does everyone think that Nina turned out? Her past is very much in her present, but she has chosen life. And Kitty? Don't know. Did not look too good.

(less)

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Mar 30, 2013 David rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2013, library-book, fiction

This one very nearly made it on my "unlike Magnus" shelf of books that I started but chose not to finish. I did manage to skim through to the end, but it felt more like drowning than swimming. It made it to the Booker Prize shortlist in 2012 and received rave reviews across the serious press, so clearly those better qualified that me to offer an objective literary assessment of its value rate it very highly. For my own part though, I reacted against it so strongly as to be unable to approach it...more

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Mar 16, 2013 Hilary rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: shortlisted

Over the past few years, I’ve found the Man Booker shortlist to be a pretty reliable source of new, interesting books I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise, like 2011’s excellent Pigeon English and The Sisters Brothers, or, from 2010, Room, Andrea Levy’s amazing The Long Song, and Tom McCarthy’s weird-but-interesting C. This year, however, while Bring Up the Bodies was absolutely brills, the two shortlisted works I’ve read - this book and The Garden of Evening Mists - have been absolute Crap City...more Over the past few years, I’ve found the Man Booker shortlist to be a pretty reliable source of new, interesting books I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise, like 2011’s excellent Pigeon English and The Sisters Brothers, or, from 2010, Room, Andrea Levy’s amazing The Long Song, and Tom McCarthy’s weird-but-interesting C. This year, however, while Bring Up the Bodies was absolutely brills, the two shortlisted works I’ve read - this book and The Garden of Evening Mists - have been absolute Crap City. I know it’s only March, but this will almost definitely be the worst thing I read this year, even if I end up reading something like a Family Circus Compendium of Only Those Strips Where Jeffy Runs Around in a Circuitous Route as Opposed to a Much More Sensible Straight Line.

From the outset, Swimming Home is notably awkward and unbuyable, full of stilted dialogue and awkward phrasing that makes it read like a poorly translated Chekov play. For example, in the opening scene, where the five vacationers (Isabel Jacobs, famed war correspondent; Jozef “Joe” Jacobs, famed poet; their 14-year-old daughter, Nina; their friends, Laura and Mitchell) discover something in their pool, Isabel says something “in her detached war-correspondent voice,” not because she’s using a particular tone of voice, but because she’s a war correspondent, and the author couldn’t think of a better way to introduce this fact.

For some reason, although the thing in the pool is actually a naked young woman - Kitty, a young woman with mental problems and an aversion to clothes trying to play the part of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl - they think it might be a bear, because just the day before, they discussed an article where a bear swam in a Hollywood actor’s pool and was shot with a tranquilizer gun, leading the famous, renowned poet, Jozef, to go off on the following sub-Bania-from-Seinfeld “riff”: “Did [the bear] ever get home? Perhaps the barbiturate inserted inside the dart, also known as ‘chemical capture,’ had made the bear’s legs shake and jerk? Had the tranquilliser helped the bear cope with life’s stressful events, calming its agitated mind so that it now pleaded with authorities to throw it small prey injected with barbiturate syrups?” And there you have it: a ridiculous “is it a small, petite woman whose craziness and sensuality will further strain the Jacobs’ marriage or a huge, hulking bear that has never been seen in the French Riviera” mixup, a poet who apparently writes for Jay Leno, and the awkward writing (the forced “chemical capture” fact is so unnecessary).

It only gets worse from there: Joe quickly realizes that Kitty’s yet another one of his fawning young female fans who track him down and beg him to read one of the poems his greatness has inspired, which makes perfect sense, because everyone everywhere simply cannot get enough poetry. I had to quit my job because I am always so busy buying books of poetry and storing all my tons of similar books of poetry in my Oakland-sized warehouses devoted exclusively to all the books of poetry I own, and then there are all the poetry TV shows I watch, the lengthy Us and Ok! and InStyle features I read about poets and what they’re wearing, and all the poets I stalk. So a plot centered around young girls loving poetry and being totally enthralled by a guy whose “most famous poem” suggests that “a bad fairy made a deal with me, ‘give me your history and I will give you something to take it away’ ” makes perfect sense to me because that is some great-ass poetry and everyone loves poetry.

The only upside to this book is that it’s under 160 pages, and thus, is over relatively quickly, and there are a lot of poorly written lines to laugh at along the way. Like when that artsy poet totally sticks it to Mitchell by saying: “It’s rude to be so normal, Mitchell. Even you must have been a child once. Even you might have thought that there were monsters lurking under your bed. Now that you are such an impeccably normal adult you probably take a discreet look under the bed and tell yourself, well, maybe the monster is invisible!” OH SNAP! It’s great that someone whose whole conceit is that he’s great with words is so good with witty ripostes, right? Tersely worded bon mots that don’t at all sound like a German exchange student putting on the worst one-act black box play you could ever see about his depression and how his parents just don’t “get him” with their nine to five reality mentalities, man?

Simply awful.(less)

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Feb 28, 2013 Sherry rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Well, an interesting book.

Not sure I liked the 'flow' of the story as it jumped around in time, although it all took place within a week.

Probably need to reread this one.

Anyway it is about depression, it's effects, etc.

An English family of 3, 2 of their friends, and s stranger are staying in a villa in the mountains above Nice. The stranger turns out to be a fan of the poet (the father) and shows up to talk with him about a poem she has written. They both have a long history of depression, thou...more

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Feb 22, 2013 Khanam rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

As Chekhov said, if there's a gun in the first scene then you can be sure it will go off by the end.

This is a subtle portrayal of mental illness, of a long term suicidal depression, the kind that just drags on day after day until something snaps.

That Kitty Finch is naked for no good reason a lot of the time made it a bit difficult to picture some of the scenes yet it also lent an erotic, off-balance edge to the action. I was hoping Nina's latent sexuality would be explored in relation to Kitty,...more

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Feb 12, 2013 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Depression and rejection drive this great novel which was nominated for a booker this year. Levy has packed a lot of emotion into her characters, and the tensions between spouses, friends, families and a disturbed stalker who both depend on and despise each other brilliantly bubble over a peaceful but hostile Mediterranean background.

The story depicts a tumultuous week in the south of France revolving around the dysfunctional relationships between Joe, a famous English poet on holiday with his n...more

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Jan 13, 2013 christa rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Vacation game-changer: Returning to the French villa to find a naked woman, briefly mistaken for a bear, floating in the pool. She’s Kitty Finch, thin and green nailed, a botanist slash poet who prefers nudity to its opposite. The vacation she’s ruining belongs to the famous poet Joe Jacobs, war correspondent Isabel Jacobs and their daughter Nina, who is about to pass a milestone as she closes in on womanhood -- and ruin the bed sheets in the process. Family friends Laura and Mitchell, who own a...more Vacation game-changer: Returning to the French villa to find a naked woman, briefly mistaken for a bear, floating in the pool. She’s Kitty Finch, thin and green nailed, a botanist slash poet who prefers nudity to its opposite. The vacation she’s ruining belongs to the famous poet Joe Jacobs, war correspondent Isabel Jacobs and their daughter Nina, who is about to pass a milestone as she closes in on womanhood -- and ruin the bed sheets in the process. Family friends Laura and Mitchell, who own a shop where they sell antique weapons, are sharing space for the holiday.

Kitty Finch is the wild card force at the center of London-based writer Deborah Levy’s novel “Swimming Home.” She claims its a scheduling snafu at the villa -- the owner sometimes lets her crash there to do botanist things -- that landed her naked in the pool, and slowly, nakedly leaving the pool to get dressed. It isn’t until after Isabel Jacobs, strangely enough, invites the lovely woman a spare room in the villa that the truth comes out: Kitty Finch is purposefully trying to get closer to Joe Jacobs so he will read a poem she has written, also titled “Swimming Home,” and because she feels that his poems are a dialogue with her. (They both struggle with depression. The poet’s is well-chronicled, the botanist’s has resulted in electroshock therapy).

Just the next door neighbor, Madeleine Sheridan, seems to have a clear view of what’s happening during this week-long weirdness. She’s got a good vantage point from her patio and the inside scoop on how Kitty Finch went from naked in an alley to institutionalized. The caretaker, a hippie stoner, sort of sees the bigger picture, but his life goal is to marry Kitty so it doesn’t really matter.

This super shorty is divided into day-length chapters that transition smoothly between perspectives and feel episodic, while also swirling toward some sort of catastrophic moment that is hinted about in the quick-hit scene that starts the story: Kitty Finch, her silk dress falling off her shoulder, driving on a mountain road at midnight. She’s got a remorseful Joe Jacobs in the passenger seat. He’s asking her to please get him home safely to his wife and daughter.

“Life is only worth living because e hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely,” she says to him.

This story has the feel of one of those early-to-mid-1900s, “oh we’re on holiday” novels that reek of large hats, cold drinks and laziness -- except it’s set in 1994 and while there is a laziness, there is also the subtle unfolding of Kitty Finch’s madness, Joe Jacobs’ inability to put the brakes on a disastrous affair, Nina’s dizziness in the presence of Kitty, whom she compares to champaign, and the truth behind why an important face in journalism would allow a lovely and naked woman who carries her husband’s complete collection of books, to share a vacation villa. And it’s all written in this great subtle way where words weigh more and are arranged in an especially satisfying way.(less)

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Dec 27, 2012 Matthew rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recently I've been suffering from a disease that will be familiar to most readers - post classic blues. In other words War and Peace is a hard act to follow. Whatever I picked up or considered as a next read seemed puny and insignificant. My scorn for what I began to sneeringly think of as contemptible fiction (rather than contemporary) swelled like a puss-filled boil until eventually, to my extreme relief, Deborah Levy burst it with Swimming Home.

Swimming Home revolves around a black dog black...more Recently I've been suffering from a disease that will be familiar to most readers - post classic blues. In other words War and Peace is a hard act to follow. Whatever I picked up or considered as a next read seemed puny and insignificant. My scorn for what I began to sneeringly think of as contemptible fiction (rather than contemporary) swelled like a puss-filled boil until eventually, to my extreme relief, Deborah Levy burst it with Swimming Home.

Swimming Home revolves around a black dog black hole. At first we think this is Kitty Finch found naked in the swimming pool in the holiday villa hired by a famous poet, his war-correspondent wife, their beautiful teenage daughter and their two Kings Cross shop-owning friends. Kitty's fragile "I stopped taking my pills" demeanour is simultaneously attractive and dangerous. Yet nothing in this surprising narrative can be judged according to the displayed surface. The book is prefaced by a quote from La Revolution surrealiste: "Each morning in every family, men, women and children, if they have nothing better to do, tell each other their dreams. We are at the mercy of the dream and we owe it to ourselves to submit its power to the waking state." Dreams and novels share many things. I don't want to get bogged down in that now, neither do I want to talk about "dreamlike prose" or make any of the other worn out comments I could about dreams and fictional narratives - what should be made clear is that the experience of reading Swimming Home is more dreamlike than usual. This quality is constantly expressed in Levy's prose:

"The young woman was a window waiting to be climbed through."

Descriptive images that appear to describe one thing actually reveal something else - a related quality perhaps but not what was expected. The effect is one of dislocation and confusion that does not muddle the reader - rather the writing forces further focus, closer reading and therefore intense engagement. Indeed it is hard to put the book down. Since it is relatively short I would recommend reading it in one sitting. Hours will pass. You will forget to eat. When you finish the novel there will be shock - the snap-back to attention of the floppy-headed evening commuter. Ah. Here I am. Here. The waking world has returned, familiar and yet subtly changed. It is impossible to say nothing happened while you were sleeping/reading.

The dark heart of the book is expressed with self-inflicted violence. Comforting her teenage daughter the war correspondant mother echoes the nihilistic lyrics of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain: "Never mind, never mind." The girl had built a shrine to Cobain when he killed himself and now, unconsciously, her mother soothes her with words that echo his refrain from Smells Like Teen Spirit - "Oh well, whatever never mind." Thus the book weaves reality into the artificial - blurring, unsettling, wonderful stuff... (less)

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Dec 20, 2012 Lori rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: weird-good-books

This was definitely an intriguing book for me. I hadn't really read the summary when I started, so I was plunged headfirst into the crazy plot without knowing what was going to come next.

The setting begins like a stereotypical family vacation novel in Nice, with two older parents and their fourteen-year-old daughter vacationing with two family friends. Then things quickly become much more interesting when they see a young woman floating facedown in the water. Alive. And naked, which everyone pre...more

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Dec 17, 2012 Nivedita Barve rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012-reading

A peaceful family vacation in the sunny Nice, away from the wars and economic crises, is not really going well for the two holidaying families. Jozef, a famous poet, rich and successful, is married to the tough Isabel, a war correspondent and they have a teenage daughter Nina. Mitchell and Laura run a shop in Euston selling African jewellery. There are rifts in the relationships and there are financial pressures, and the swimming pool with its cloudy water has spat out a beautiful girl in their...more

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Dec 03, 2012 Mac rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize" offers a sense of promise to any book, and Swimming Home initially delivers on that promise. The novel begins with a rich mix of character conflict, intrigue, and foreboding of troubles to come. The two central couples, plus a teenage daughter, on vacation near Nice, all quickly reveal numerous interpersonal problems, especially when confronted with a surprise visitor, Kitty, a fragile, supposed botanist/poet. So I found myself saying, "I'm glad I'm reading...more

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Dec 03, 2012 Ailsa rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Deborah Levy's Swimming Home is a slim volume that has earned high praise (the foreword is written by a positively gushing Tom McCarthy) and, of course, a place on the Booker shortlist. However, whilst Levy's craftmanship is undeniable (the crisp lucidity of her prose is a pleasure to read) this book feels ultimately disappointing. The extent of Levy's ambitions is clear: this novel is self-consciously literary in its attempts to couple personal trauma and memory with the worst horrors of twenti...more

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Nov 27, 2012 Vicki rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Deborah Levy's Swimming Home opens with a careering, hands-off-the-steering-wheel plunge down a perilous road. You're given little opportunity from the outset to catch your breath from there to the framing repetitions of this same ride towards the end of this slender, gripping novel.

The story's chronology commences with the startling arrival of an interloper and the even more startling invitation to the interloper to stay, amidst a group of vividly unhappy vacationers sharing a villa on the Fren...more

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Nov 21, 2012 Thaisa Frank rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Swimming Home could be (at first glance) written off as the British-family-on-vacation-in-France book. But this is more than a family---there are numerous characters we get to know well. And far more than a vacation. It is, in fact, an unexpected odyssey into the life of one of the vacationers with the inimitable, crazy, anorexic, sugar-mouse-nibbling Kitty Finch as the catalyst. Deborah Levy doesn't miss a beat in describing her characters---even the ancient neighbor (a woman), who used to be a...more

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Nov 13, 2012 Petitcreiu rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

As many others, I got this book because it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
I admit that I found the summary on the blurb a little corny, but that could have been misleading. Well, it wasn't, really. The novel is still well-written (and short) enough to finish it in two evening sessions, and as I wondered quite a while in which direction the author was heading with this, I was curious enough to keep on reading.
The characters, however, are too over the top. Does it really have to be the...more

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Nov 12, 2012 Leeswammes rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Joe is a well-known poet who spends a holiday with his wife and daughter, and another couple, at a villa in France. Then a young woman shows up and is given the spare room. Kitty Finch is a fan of Joe and writes poetry herself. She’s also mentally unstable. Soon, it becomes clear that this combination of characters will lead to an explosive ending of the novel.

The short novel exudes a holiday atmosphere, languid summer days in which not much happens. While this is pleasant to read, it also means...more

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Nov 01, 2012 Ruby Soames rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely." This is the basic tenet of the eerie, dark and expertly written story, 'Swimming Home'. And the book is only worth reading because we hope it will get better and we'll all get to the end quickly.

Two middle-class, middle-aged couples find a naked girl in their swimming pool (novel awash with water symbolism) while staying in a rental villa on holiday on the Riviera. One of the guests invites Kitty Finch...more

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Oct 23, 2012 Jennifer rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012, booker-prize-long-list-2012

I've been putting off this review because Swimming Home has me a little stymied. Two families on holiday in a villa in Nice are surprised when a naked woman is found swimming in the pool one morning. Kitty Finch, the story's catalyst, has no where to stay and is invited to take a room with the in the villa. We soon learn that she is not there by accident but that she is there to meet Joe, a famous poet, to have him read one of her poems. The plot unfolds through the eyes of several different cha...more

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Oct 23, 2012 Jason Edwards rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It took me 28 days to read a book I didn't enjoy. It took me about 18 hours to get through Swimming Home, so what does that say? One thing it says: short book. “Slender” is the word I see other reviewers use. Somebody’s probably got something to say about modern attention spans and novels these days, although I wonder if it’s more a matter of readers being smarter than they use to be. I’m rationalizing, trying to justify the book’s brevity, to justify my enjoyment of it. I don’ know the author v...more

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Oct 16, 2012 Rosario (http://rosario.blogspot.com/) added it · review of another edition

Shelves: dnf

Levy takes the very familiar setup of two middle-class British families on holiday in a French villa and, according to seemingly hundreds of gushing reviews, uses the introduction of a stranger bent on causing trouble to make it into an affecting examination of depression and madness.

I'm afraid I'll have to file this one under "not for me", even if it marks me as a complete philistine. I read about half the book, so I did honestly give it a shot. All I got from that, however, was characters who...more

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Oct 04, 2012 Angela Young rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The epigraph to Swimming Home is:

Each morning in every family, men, women and children,
if they have nothing better to do, tell each other their dreams.
We are all at the mercy of the dream and we owe it to
ourselves to submit its power to the waking state.

- La Revolution surrealiste, No. 1, December 1924

Deborah Levy does this magnificently in Swimming Home although, after the first few pages, I almost gave up. I wasn't looking forward to picking the book up again but I did because I wanted to f...more The epigraph to Swimming Home is:

Each morning in every family, men, women and children,
if they have nothing better to do, tell each other their dreams.
We are all at the mercy of the dream and we owe it to
ourselves to submit its power to the waking state.

- La Revolution surrealiste, No. 1, December 1924

Deborah Levy does this magnificently in Swimming Home although, after the first few pages, I almost gave up. I wasn't looking forward to picking the book up again but I did because I wanted to find out why Levy is so highly praised and/or why I disagreed with that praise (and why the book has been shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize). And then, from the scene in the orchard, called The Botany Lesson (there are many subheadings throughout the book) - which begins on page 18 - I was hooked. The hints of intimacy that build up between Joe Jacobs, famous poet and married man, and Kitty Finch, wannabe poet and free spirit, intrigued me and when Joe Jacobs thinks, 'Whoever made her was clever,' I had to know what happened. And by then the other characters were beginning to live, through Levy's short deft sentences (I disliked Madeleine Sheridan very much - which is a clever trick for a writer to pull off when there's only been a few lines about her and she hasn't - yet - done anything hateful; and Isobel Jacobs's lack of self-confidence and her decision to imitate another group of mothers who buy their children ice-creams was very touching.) And throughout the book it seems to me Levy has submitted the power of the dream to the waking state. It has the potency and lucid clarity of dreams. It is as compelling as dreams are and as logically strange. The way the points of view move between characters is as fluid and clear as dreams are and the fear Levy subtly instilled in me, the sense that something terrible was going to happen although I wasn't sure what, was exactly like the foreboding dreams can bring.

I am left with a peculiar sense that to properly understand this novel I need to dream about it, because although the story and its telling are resonantly clear, the meanings below the surface will, I think, reveal themselves when I swim there in my dreams.(less)

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About Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts leaving in 1981 to write a number of plays, highly acclaimed for their "intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination", including PAX, HERESIES for the Royal Shakespeare Company, CLAM, CALL BLUE JANE, SHINY NYLON, HONEY BABY MIDDLE ENGLAND, PUSHING THE PRINCE INTO DENMARK and MACBETH-FALSE MEMORIES, some of which are published in LEVY...more

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Quotes from Swimming Home

“She was not a poet. She was a poem.” — 8 people liked it

“Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we'll all get home safely. But you tried and you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all.” — 5 people liked it

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