Deborah Levy
Hot Milk by Deborah Levy unfolds in the first-person voice of Sofia Papastergiadis, a twenty-five-year-old with an English mother and a Greek father who abandoned them when she was a teenager. The novel opens with Sofia and her mother, Rose. They’re in Spain to attend a health clinic where they hope the consultant, Dr. Gomez, will address Rose’s multiple ailments, including her intermittent inability to walk.
Sofia is listless, insecure, confused, adrift, and totally consumed with taking care of her mother’s needs. She even abandoned her Ph.D. to care for her mother. Her identity seems to be fused with her mother to the degree that she will occasionally adopt her mother’s limp while walking. “My legs are her legs,” is her constant refrain. For her part, Rose is cantankerous, endlessly demanding, never satisfied, abusive, and claims to be in constant pain. There is a suggestion that some of her ailments may be psychosomatic.
Very little happens in the novel. Sofia and Rose visit Dr. Gomez’s clinic, where he proceeds to put Rose through a series of tests to diagnose her problem and determine treatment. His unconventional approach includes taking her out to lunch and taking her off all her medications. Meanwhile, Sofia has sexual relationships with a German girl and a young Spaniard who works on the beach applying ointment on jellyfish stings.
As the novel progresses, Sofia gradually gathers strength, begins to take risks, and becomes more assertive. She visits her estranged father with his young wife and baby daughter in Greece, in the hope of reconnecting with him. But he is too wrapped up in himself and his new family. When she returns to Spain, she takes out her anger and frustration at her mother in a surprising way.
Sofia’s relationship with her mother is fraught with tension, a simmering aggression, guilt, and resentment. It borders on being parasitic although one is never quite sure who is the parasite and who is the host in this fractured relationship. The boundary between her identity and her mother’s identity is fluid and constantly shifting. She grapples with unearthing an identity for herself that is separate from her mother.
The novel is dense, the prose lucid, the technique stream of consciousness. Sofia shares her unfiltered, sporadic thoughts as they come to her. The problem is Sofia is not very interesting and what happens to her is even less interesting. Her interiority, with its perpetual navel-gazing and fractured self-image, becomes tedious and repetitive.
I really enjoyed Levy’s Swimming Home. This one, not so much. Perhaps it just wasn’t for me.