what I read last week
august blue, patriot
Good afternoon! This past week, I read two great books: August Blue by Deborah Levy, a literary fiction novel about a famous piano virtuoso trying to make sense of her identity, and Patriot by Alexei Navalny, a posthumous memoir by a Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist who died in prison in Russia in February 2024. Let’s get into it.
read📖→
August Blue follows a famous pianist as she tries to make sense of her identity during the pandemic.
Overview: August Blue opens with Elsa M. Anderson, a 34-year-old celebrity concert pianist, at a flea market in Athens. She watches a woman, her doppelgänger, buy two battery-powered mechanical horses. To “start the horse, which was the length of two large hands, she had to lift up its tail. To stop it she must pull the tail down.” Elsa observes that each horse had a “string tied to its neck and if she held the string upwards and outwards, she could direct its movements.” Elsa’s doppelgänger buys the two horses.
We learn that Elsa is hiding in Athens after a mishap at a concert in Vienna at the height of her career. Elsa lost her place while playing Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2. Unable to play Rachmaninov, Elsa began playing an original composition and then walked off stage in embarrassment.
Elsa was a child prodigy and was adopted by Arthur Goldstein, an acclaimed piano teacher, when she was six. Arthur changed her name from Anna to Elsa. She doesn’t know who her birth parents were and has no family apart from Arthur, now eighty years old and retired in Sardinia.
Elsa resembles “a prima ballerina;” she is six feet tall and has long brown hair that is “always plaited and coiled around [her] head.” A week before the performance, Elsa dyed her signature long brown hair a striking shade of blue: “Blue was a separation from my DNA. We both knew that I wanted to sever the possibility that I resembled my unknown parents.”
Levy follows Elsa through London, Paris, Greece, Sardinia, and Germany as she deals with the fallout from her performance and makes sense of her own identity. As Elsa travels around Europe, her doppelgänger follows her.
Opinion: August Blue is the fourth book by Deborah Levy that I’ve read in the past year (Hot Milk, Swimming Home, The Man Who Saw Everything). I’m a huge fan. I think she’s one of the greatest living writers right now. However, her books are weird and aren’t for everyone. They are slim novels packed with intricate symbolism, Freudian and Nietzschean references, and magical realism. Her writing style is crisp and precise with pithy lines like in August Blue: “Capitalism sold a flat white to me as if it were a cup of freedom.”
This book has the same lyrical quality and sharp writing of Levy’s other books. Thematically, August Blue is relatively straightforward compared to Hot Milk, Swimming Home, and The Man Who Saw Everything. This book is full of symbolism and metaphors, expressed through mundane details, but the symbolism is easier to parse out. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—August Blue might be Levy’s most approachable book.
Doppelgängers tend to represent the divided self, or the repressed parts of ourselves. Doubles abound and gradually multiply. The novel opens with 2s: the two horses, Elsa and her doppelgänger (“She was me and I was her”), the two minutes and twelve seconds Elsa played her own composition on the Vienna stage, and Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2. When she’s in her Parisian apartment, she sees ants across the edges of her bathtub, mirroring the ants in her London bath: “They had found a portal to all my worlds.” The numbers multiply, and Elsa notes increasingly large numbers: “flocks of pigeons,” “seven ambulances,” “six chairs,” and “people queuing.”
Music and the idea of the double parallel each other. As Elsa notes, “I decided to think of the woman who had bought the horses as my double. I heard her voice as music, a mood, or sometimes as a combination of two chords. She frightened me. She was more knowing than I was. She made me feel less alone.” Levy’s writing style also mirrors a musical composition that repeats itself:
Maybe I am. What? An orphan.
Maybe I am. What? Brutal.
Maybe I am. Crushed.
Maybe I am. A portal.
Maybe I am. Looking for signs.
What sort of signs? Reasons to live.
I was a natural blue. I am a natural blue. I was, I am.
If you are not you, who? If she was not there, where?
Here are all of the songs referenced in the book:
August Blue is ultimately about the unraveling of Elsa’s identity. At one point, Elsa speaks with Marie, her friend who is seventy years old. Marie has silver hair, which she tells Elsa “represents the person she became internally before she cut her hair . . . . I have accepted the evolution of my life on earth.” But Marie tells Elsa that with her blue hair, Elsa “had to create yourself.”
Elsa is forming her own identity. “What I wanted for myself was a new composition,” Elsa says. “I wanted to pull the tail down on everything.” Levy also plays with the idea of what the instrument is and who is being played. Arthur tells Elsa that the player in the instrument, not the piano. Who is playing Elsa? Elsa notes that the horses were not the instrument; “it was the longing for magic and flight that was the instrument.”
Overall: August Blue would be a great introduction to Deborah Levy if you haven’t read her other books yet. Fans of Levy might find this a little less interesting than her other works, but I would still recommend this book to anyone who likes literary fiction!
Rating: 4/5
Genre: Literary Fiction
Page count: 198 pages
Audio: 4 hours 16 minutes
Movie/TV Pairings: Black Swan, Whiplash, Tár, Killing Eve
Patriot: A Memoir by Alexei Navalny
Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist, died in a Russian prison north of the Article Circle in February 2024 at age 47. Patriot is Alexei Navalny’s posthumous memoir published by his widow, Yulia Navalnaya.
Overview: Navalny’s memoir opens with his near-death experience in August 2020. Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent when flying in Siberia. He was put in a medically-induced coma in Omsk, Russia, and was evacuated to Charité Hospital in Berlin a few days later.
Navalny began writing his memoir after this 2020 chemical attack. He planned to write “an autobiography with an intriguing thriller about uncovering an assassination attempt using chemical weapon.” However, before he could complete the manuscript, Navalny was arrested in January 2021 when he returned to Russia for violating his parole conditions stemming from an earlier embezzlement conviction.
Navalny continued to write his memoir in prison but as he lamented, his thriller “has turned into a prison diary. It’s a genre so saturated with clichés that it’s impossible not to write them. If I got a dollar for every ‘We didn’t get to say goodbye’ encountered in such literature, I’d be like Elon Musk.”
In 2022, while incarcerated, Navalny was convicted of additional embezzlement and contempt of court charges and was sentenced to an additional nine years. In 2023, he received a further nineteen years for extremism. He died while serving the sentence. The first half of Patriot traces Navalny’s childhood, career as a lawyer, and journey to becoming a political activist. The second half of the memoir is his “prison diary.”
The toll Navalny and his family have paid is immense. His brother, Oleg, spent three and a half years in prison on fraud charges that the European Court of Human Rights declared “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable.” His wife, Yulia, thinks she survived a poisoning several weeks before Navalny was hospitalized in 2020.
Navalny’s offices were bugged for years. He was jailed repeatedly and suffered multiple chemical attacks. In 2017, Navalny lost 80% of the sight in his right eye after being sprayed on the street with chemicals. In 2019, when he was imprisoned in Russia, he was hospitalized and diagnosed with an allergic reaction, although his lawyers alleged that it was a chemical attack.
Opinion: As a quick preface, I knew very little about Navalny going into this book. I’ve only read articles about the attacks on Navalny and about his death. Navalny was the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary, but I haven’t seen it.
What Navalny and his family go through is unbelievable. One might expect Navalny to come across like a stoic martyr or, as one reviewer noted, for this book to read like “righteous diatribe.” It does not.
What’s truly remarkable about Patriot is that the reader comes away with a sense of Navalny as a person. Navalny did seem to have a superhuman capacity to see the good in people. He also accepted everything with remarkable stoicism, but he also had a witty sense of humor, was charismatic, and kind. He loved Rick and Morty and The Wire. Even in prison, he maintained his humor, even as it became gallows humor. At one point in prison, he joked that the memoir might be more successful if he were to die: “The book’s author has been murdered by a villainous president; what more could the marketing department ask for?”
I don’t have real critiques of Patriot, but I’ll share two observations. First, Patriot is clearly a political memoir; Navalny had a clear point of view on Russian politics. While Navalny is perhaps the most well known opposition figure, the political opposition to Putin is not necessarily cohesive. Navalny also has his critics, particularly with respect to his proximity to nationalism, which he addressed in Patriot.
Second, while the memoir is well-edited, the writing style varies heavily. Obviously, Navalny could not finish his memoir and wrote much of this book in a piecemeal fashion. The memoir includes transcripts of his speeches, statements in court, and letters from prison.
Overall: I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 4/5
Genre: Nonfiction (Memoir)
Notable prizes/book clubs/lists: National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for Autobiography (2024)
Page count: 496 pages
Audio: 16 hours 46 minutes
Movie/TV pairings: Navalny (2022 Oscar-winning documentary)
consumed 🎬🎧🗞️→
I watched (and loved) the new Bridget Jones movie this week. I love this tour of the set.
I watched Mindy Kaling’s new show starring Kate Hudson, Running Point, this week. It’s a fun escapist show.
cooked 🍳→
Nancy’s Italian chopped salad is the perfect meal salad—like an Italian sub without the bread.
Molly Baz’s halloumi salad and Zahav’s laffa are two of my favorite recipes.
This apple Dutch baby recipe is delicious and so easy.