Speaker
Description
Deborah Levy’s August Blue (2023) displays the condition of crisis as both a thematic concern and a structuring principle of narrative. The novel follows Elsa M. Anderson, a prodigious pianist whose aborted performance of Rachmaninov becomes the catalyst for a series of dislocations: the collapse of artistic mastery, the fracturing of selfhood, and the unraveling of secure belonging. Rather than presenting crisis as a singular rupture, Levy portrays it as an ongoing state of suspension, a liminal zone in which concepts such as identity, genius, and home become unstable. Central to this portrayal is Elsa’s recurrent encounter with her uncanny double, a figure who embodies estrangement but also intimates alternative possibilities for self-recognition and renewal. This paper predominantly focuses of the role of music in the novel, which is pivotal in the novel’s negotiation of crisis. Music, within the narrative, functions both as the site of Elsa’s initial breakdown and as a language through which she struggles to reconfigure her subjectivity. Levy presents music not only as performance but also as a form of expression and communication that exceeds speech, allowing moments of intimacy, resistance, and self-discovery. Thus, the novel highlights the dual nature of music: its potential to expose vulnerability and failure, and its capacity to articulate otherwise inexpressible experiences of displacement and longing. Through its fragmented geographies—mostly ranging across Europe—, it’s emphasis on music as a medium of relationality, and its shifting temporalities, the novel dramatizes how crises of subjectivity, creativity, and belonging are entangled with broader cultural uncertainties around displacement and the dissolution of stable narratives of progress.
| Keywords | August Bule, Deborah Levy, music in literature, identity, crisis |
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| zeynep.bilge@msgsu.edu.tr |