Diary of a Steak

by Deborah Levy, Michael Bracewell, Jane Rolo

Deborah Levy’s witty take on the hysteria surrounding ‘Mad Cow Disease’ is both highly amusing and deeply disturbing. Written in the form of a diary of a steak in a butcher’s shop, the narrative charts a progression into madness. Using typographical errors, omissions and forays into other languages, Deborah Levy describes a “mind that has been symbolically culled”. Referencing Freud, psychoanalysis, Jean-Martin Charcot, the English pride in madness and the herd mentality, Diary of a Steak is both thought-provoking and poignant.

52 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

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: PLAYS 1 (Methuen)

Deborah wrote and published her first novel BEAUTIFUL MUTANTS (Vintage), when she was 27 years old. The experience of not having to give her words to a director, actors and designer to interpret, was so exhilarating, she wrote a few more. These include, SWALLOWING GEOGRAPHY, THE UNLOVED (Vintage) and BILLY and GIRL (Bloomsbury). She has always written across a number of art forms (see Bookworks and Collaborations with visual artists) and was Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1989-1991.

Reviews

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

At just 45 pages with many of those containing a lot of empty space, this is not a book that will take you a long time to read.

But it may well leave your head spinning.

Imagine what a piece of steak might have to say if it underwent the talking cure after becoming infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE).

You can’t?

Don’t worry: Deborah Levy has done it for you.

But a “mad cow” isn’t necessarily just a crazy milk producing farm animal. It could, if used in the rather insulting English slang term, also be a hysterical woman.

Published in 1997, just after the European Union banned exports of British beef, this is Levy’s response to the BSE crisis charting a piece of meat’s descent into madness (liberal use of typographical errors, missing letters/words and bits of a sort of Greek/English language - Greek characters spelling English words) in parallel with an look at the treatment of feminine hysteria.

It’s very odd but strangely amusing and thought-provoking.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

Levy is one of my all time favorite authors, so I had to track down a copy of this elusive early work in order to complete her entire oeuvre (... with the exception of her plays, which I've always found virtually incomprehensible). While I'm not sorry to have read it, I can't say it blew me away any either - it's rather an odd prose tone poem; if I am reading it correctly, a conflation of a history of hysteria with the then current madness concerning 'Mad Cow Disease'. It's an interesting and occasionally entertaining bagatelle - but not much more than that, sorry to say.

[Ross · Rating 2 out of 5]

hmm whatever the fuck that was

[Lianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

So utterly strange but ultimately moving. It wasn't easy to track down a copy, but it was worth the wait. Yes, on the surface the narrator is a steak with mad cow disease, and it's as weird as it sounds. But it's also a meditation on hysteria and femininity. The more I think about this book, the more I love it.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“She taught me everything. Perfected my falls. Rolled my eyes. She made me do it again and again. I have made a career out of melancholy and mania. Please gentlemen: I would like to perform for you my erotic music.” Diary of a Steak, a short experimental piece by Deborah Levy, embodies the “hysteria” surrounding the Mad Cow Disease outbreak of the late 1990s through the interior monologue — funny and roving and disjointed — of Buttercup the cow. In a text which reminds us that “the mind is a body”, Levy is continuously pivoting from one provocation to another, and moves along the intersecting fault lines of gender politics and national identity, meat and madness, history and histrionics. “Mad was a source of national pride. England led the world in an epidemic of advanced insanity.” Form and language are used to explore questions of perspective and narrative: “Is it possible to make a poetics of spleen kidney and tongue? I lost my mind before they called it. Loss is not the equation.” The strange flow of the mad cow mind is both hypnotic and repulsive, insisting on itself, on horrible reality, on how madness and sickness are not aberrations but inherent: “Telepathic legislation to the herd: You are normal / You are the National Anthem.” Now that I’ve read all of Levy’s books, rarities included, I can say that Diary of a Steak is easily my favourite of her fiction works — tenacious and rancid. “I’m a herbivore but I was made into a carnival.”

[Daniel]

A provocative exploration of hysteria and the feminisation of madness through the narration of a steak waiting to be sold during the height of BSE (or 'Mad Cow disease'). Despite its short length, I found this work very dense, and at times opaque and difficult to access. There are also some small moments of racial commentary that didn't sit well with me on first read, perhaps intentionally? Definitely need to sit with this odd work a little longer.

[Grandpasbookclub · Rating 3 out of 5]

Utterly strange yet intriguing. This book follows a piece of steak in a butcher shop as it waits to be sold at the height of the mad cow’s disease. It only took me half an hour to read and it had me captivated.

[Wout Landuyt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Geen kloten van begrepen, wel heel leuk.

[Becca Whiteing · Rating 4 out of 5]

The description of a uterus as meat, alongside a cows first person narration in a slaughter house, reading this alongside All Fours was incred