Real Estate: A Living Autobiography

This might have been my favorite book this year. Deborah Levy's prose is charming and interesting; reading the book is like having coffee with a warm, intelligent friend who isn't afraid to say the bad stuff as well as the good. And who dresses well.

A fiercely beautiful dream of a 60 year old woman living life without having to share it for the day. What is a home?

Haunted by exile and leaving Africa when she was 9 years old, the author writes about the life and preoccupations of a British female writer who just turned sixty and lost her youngest daughter to university and adulthood. Loneliness mingles with creativity in this book that continuously questions the burdens and joys of a woman’s life. Levy’s prose is gorgeous! I recommend these memoirs.

Wonderful to read, explore and witness revelation of so many shared and illusory dreams. Life is different after reading this book.

Incredibly observant and intelligent. Philosophical and intellectual. Yet, somehow disjointed, full of non-sequiturs, uneven, and often boring. I racked my brain to figure out what exactly made parts of the book so unappealing. Was it the audiobook rendition by a reader who sounded detached? Her crisp pronunciation like audible knife points? Probably a combination of that and the author’s self-disclosing, yet emotionally withholding writing style. The beginning of the book really drew me in, but I had to push myself to keep reading it. Some of her meanderings were less interesting to me than others. But that’s to be expected. Overall, the question is: Is it worthwhile? Hearing an intelligent woman speak is always worthwhile, even if some of the things she chooses to write about are not as captivating to me as others. There is a bit of humor here, too. Always a boon. I enjoyed her feminist take on domestic space, as well as how it suffused other topics she explored. As a long married, and divorced woman approaching 70, I also appreciate how much courage it takes for any woman over 60 to choose solitude over the promise of domestic “bliss” with a partner. Both can be good, the trick is simply to know yourself. The endless conversations and reveries over her “best male friend” were tedious and boring as he seemed like a feminist’s nightmare: odious, immature, condescending, and sexist. In all fairness to the actual book, I think it really suffered from the audible version. Still, I can’t recommend it.

I read many books at once, and it's really rare for me to want to ensconce myself in just one, but if you haven't read Deborah Levy's memoirs Real Estate or The Cost of Living, you are missing out. Her writing is spare, feminist, and wry. Sometimes she makes me LOL.

What a load of pretentious hooey. Within the first 30 pages or so, Levy name drops Georgia O'Keeffe, Jacques Lacan, Sappho, Charles Baudelaire, Jane Austen, Pedro Almodovar, Rebecca West, and James Baldwin. I guess this is to prove how smart she is. But a writer who has two daughters and doesn't know that one is older and one is younger (they are not "youngest" and "oldest," which is reserved for comparisons of more than two) clearly never learned her craft (or found a good editor. Personally, I can't stand this kind of twaddle.

It’s about sense of place and Debra’s and her friends lives. The last chapter is interesting and I will listen to it again before our book club meet. The book was not memorable nor do I recommend it if you are short of time. The failing marriage running through the story it is nothing new.

Deborah Levy is a new author to me - she’s a fantastic writer - poetic and philosophical while being entertaining about her day to day life. I was captivated by this book and will buy her other 2 in this series.

A great, well written book!

I only discovered Andrea Levy's books three years ago and I have consumed them all greedily. Am so looking forward, already, to the next one....

I adore Deborah Levy's writing and maybe expected too much. There is similarity between her and my life (age, divorce after 25 years, age of children, lose of home , I was writing all my life, wondering where I belong, all philosophical questions about life and universe ), so I expected an advice how to proceed (but didn't get it). As beautiful her writing is, it seemed to me somehow disconected (maybe it is just me) this time. I've been to nearly all places that she is refering, my knowledge of poetry is obviously not as good as hers but all that didn't help, to connect all this together. I hope that the next book will be better.

Beautifully written. Gorgeous structure. You can hear, smell, touch and see as the descriptions unfold. I found myself putting in my notebook little pieces of prose that were meaningful to me to think about later or perhaps think about in a free/fluid context.