Deborah Levy was 60 years old when she wrote her Real Estate. I was 37 years old when I read this book, and I had just finished renovating my house.
That's pretty much the only reason I chose to read this book right away, I just had my own house, and I'm going to read "My Own House" in my own house. So I skipped the first part of Deborah Levy's Female Growth Trilogy ("What I Didn't Know") and the second part ("The Price of Life") and went straight to the third part. There is no contextual connection to imagine it.
"Own House" is a better name, because the literal translation of the book's original English name Real Estate means "real estate" or "real estate", and around the 2010s, I was fascinated by an American band called Real Estate under the Domino label, who combined psychedelic rock with American country folk and were very good at instrumental music and fiddling with experimental electronics**. When they released their debut in 2009, I commented that their eponymous debut *** Real Estate didn't play well to their strengths and break out of the crowd of new bands, but in 2012 when they performed live at the Imagination Project party in Beijing, I praised their live performance as more intoxicating than the studio.
Now, when I read "Own House (Real Estate)", I think deeply of this band of the same name, because Deborah Levy will continue to build the "own house" in his mind because of various situations in the book, idealized, and the actual property, fictional house, she jokingly called, this is called "unreal estate", fake real estate, famous in Chinese, "loft in the sky", this is very similar to the real estate band, American country folk is the foundation, But when he travels in different time and space, he injects a lot of psychedelic melodies.
The construction of the "Loft in the Sky" required a constant imagination of what would be added to the house, as Deborah Levy wrote at the outset – she wanted an egg-shaped fireplace. This imaginary egg-shaped fireplace then "appears" with Deborah Levy in her London apartment, her writing studio in London, her stepmother's apartment in New York, her hotel room in Mumbai, her working living room in Paris, her friend's apartment in Berlin, her rental house in Greece, ......She then bought pomegranate trees, a river, and even a raft to float in the river.
What a whimsical "decoration direction"!
Since it's in the mind, maybe it doesn't need to be implemented or practiced.
Whether it is a real house, whether in London, where Deborah Levy has lived for a long time, or in other places where she has stayed, she will describe what has happened or is happening in it—among them, Deborah Levy's male friend's wonderful marital love line is the most touching on the reader's nerves, and there are also bits and pieces of how her two daughters, like best friends, get along with her. Deborah Levy's words are humorous and jumpy, even if she buys a bouquet of flowers, throws away a bag of garbage, and so on, she can describe it as a stage play, so it's no wonder that Deborah Levy is more of a playwright.
In the process of reading "A House of Our Own", these "trivial" things and houses depicted by Deborah Levy can really appear in our minds, and always make people laugh and even provoke us to think: What should our own house, or "mansion in the sky", look like? What should we put in it?
As a reader, I just happened to have gone through this process, but my house is not in my mind, but a real house. As I write this, I'm sitting in this house, looking at my things, my installations.
First of all, it has a wall of bookcases with books, which are decorated with all kinds of decorations that I can't put down; Then I have a height-adjustable desk for typing and putting a computer, two simple folding tables for eating and writing, a variety of chairs, an inflatable sofa that I can store away at any time without taking up space, a chaise longue covered with pillows and blankets, a vinyl record player, a cassette player, a wall-mounted CD player, two disco balls, a bottle of plum, and countless Lego ......bricks that have been put togetherAh, I'll go back and go into more detail slowly.
Unlike Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, which Deborah Levy wrote as a "response" to this classic of women's writing, House of One's Own focuses more on a value: what should women leave behind to become their real estate when times change and geography shifts?
Despite the name of A House of Own, Deborah Levy wonders what estate can actually be. In the secular sense, estate can be money and property, while real estate is more clearly defined as house and real estate, but does Deborah Levy really think that a house is practical? Is it real? Do women really need a real estate property to write? She gives us the answer at the end of the book. It made me have tears in my eyes.
Recommend books to read.
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