Reading guide: Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

Sarah Lyall, The New York Times

‘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.’

Lionel Shriver, The Financial Times

‘Deborah Levy conveys an atmosphere of out-of-kilter surreality without ever violating the rules of realism. There’s no magic here, aside from the supernatural powers of peculiar prose […] Achieving quite a feat of memory and imagination for an author in her mid-fifties, Levy gives convincing voice to the foundering, floundering sensation of the mid-twenties.’

Erica Wagner, The Guardian

‘This isn’t a long novel, but it is dense in the way a poem is dense, rich with meaning poured into its simple language. […] The sense of Sofia’s life with her mother (or against her mother) is built through an accumulation of detail, a constellation of symbols and narrative bursts. But like a medusa, this novel has a transfixing gaze and a terrible sting that burns long after the final page is turned.’

Leah Hager Cohen, The New York Times Book Review

‘In Hot Milk, Levy has spun a web of violent beauty and poetical ennui. As a series of images, the book exerts a seductive, arcane power, rather like a deck of tarot cards, every page seething with lavish, cryptic innuendo. Yet, as a narrative, it is wanting […] The symbols here, although entrancing individually, feel at once overdetermined and underpurposed. They never fully ­cohere into a satisfying web.’

Jamie Fisher, The Washington Post

‘It’s easy to mistake Hot Milk for [an] empty-handed performance. But while the plot is shaggy, 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. Hot Milk isn’t the fable we asked for about the European financial crisis. But it’s the one we’ve got.’

Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

‘The effect of Sofia’s breakdown is richly destabilising and unpredictable, and very much in line with Ms Levy’s earlier barbed novels … She has found a niche unpacking the lies and power struggles of families on holiday. She can show you fear in a handful of sand. Yet the novel lacks any semblance of a convincing plot. Ms. Levy advances the story not by creating a dramatic arc but by shuffling through a set of symbols like a fortune-teller turning tarot cards.’

Hot Milk is rich in symbolism, the most notable example being Levy’s use of the Ancient Greek figure Medusa, a Gorgon with snakes instead of hair, and whose gaze turned people to stone. (At one point, Sofia says: ‘If I were to look at my mother just once in a certain way, I would turn her to stone.’) In Spanish, ‘medusa’ is also the common name for jellyfish, which repeatedly sting Sofia. How does the Medusa symbol relate to Sofia’s situation and her relationship with her mother? And what or who do you think the jellyfish represent?

Throughout the novel, it is unclear whether Rose does in fact suffer from paralysis of her legs, including a scene where Sofia sees who she believes to be her mother walking across the beach. Do you think that Sofia really did see her mother, and while reading the book did you think Rose’s physical illness was genuine?

In a review for the Guardian, Erica Wagner wrote that ‘Hot Milk is a powerful novel of the interior life, which Levy creates with a vividness that recalls Virginia Woolf.’ Do you agree with Wagner’s assessment, and if so in which parts or aspects of the book did you most see similarities between Levy and Woolf?

Sofia’s lover, Ingrid, gifts her a top, sewing a word onto the collar which Sofia reads as ‘beloved’. It’s not until after she puts it into the wash that she realises that the word says ‘beheaded’. What do you think Ingrid’s intentions were in adding this word to the garment, and why do you think Sofia misread it?

At one point, Dr Gómez says to Sofia, ‘You are using your mother like a shield to protect yourself from making a life.’ Do you think Gómez’s assertion is correct? And if so, why do you think Sofia allows her mother’s illness to prevent her from fulfilling her potential or prioritising her own life?

In an interview with the Washington Independent Review of Books, Levy said that while writing the novel she was interested in the strategies we use to gain attention and love, learning as children that if we are sick, our parents will care. ‘If it is true (from a psychoanalytic point of view) that symptoms can speak for us, then what are they saying? Hot Milk is a thriller of symptoms.’ What do you think Levy means by ‘a thriller of symptoms’, and would you agree it accurately describes the book?

In the book, Sofia admits: ‘My own sexuality is an enigma to me’. Initially weak and submissive, she allows herself to explore her sexual identity while in Spain, having affairs with a German woman, Ingrid, and a Spanish local, Juan. What purpose do these relationships serve in Sofia’s transformation?

Although Sofia is the novel’s narrator, at various points Levy includes short interludes where we briefly see things (and Sofia) from another perspective. Although it isn’t made clear whose viewpoint this is, it appears to be that of Ingrid. Why do you think Levy chose to switch the perspective in this way?

Dr Gómez is referred to as a ‘quack’ at several points in the novel. When he first meets Sofia, he explains that someone has graffitied the word on the wall of his clinic, and Sofia, who has remortgaged her property to pay for her mother’s treatment, wonders whether he can be trusted. While reading the book, did you think Gómez was a charlatan or a maverick, or something else? Were you suspicious of his methods and motives, and how did you feel about him by the end of the book?