At the height of her career, the piano virtuoso Elsa M. Anderson—former child prodigy, now in her thirties—walks off the stage in Vienna, mid-performance. Now she is in Athens, watching an uncannily familiar woman purchase a pair of mechanical dancing horses at a flea market. Elsa wants the horses too, but there are no more for sale. She drifts to the ferry port, on the run from her talent and her history. So begins her journey across Europe, shadowed by the elusive woman who seems to be her double.
Ms. Levy rewards close readers by packing her sardine-can-slim novels with tight connections ... August Blue, which builds to a moving climax, is more emotionally accessible than Ms. Levy’s previous novels. But it too encompasses the cerebral and the sentimental, realism and surrealism, love and loss, the drive to create art—and the ambiguities of human relations.
In Levy’s latest novel, August Blue, it is musical recomposition that becomes the overt, and sometimes overly self-conscious, metaphor for female revolt and reinvention ... With unconvincing touches of magical realism dabbed onto a caricature of the classical music scene, Levy’s latest take on women’s agony and agency in a patriarchal world reads less like a novel and more like a manifesto nailed to a rickety plot ... Along the way, the book offers glimpses of Levy’s talent as a stylist. She can sketch a scene with a few precise brushstrokes and conjure emotion out of white space on the page ... For an author so committed to dismantling stereotypes, it is a shame Levy should sketch out her own with such a thick pen.
Levy’s novels have an undeniable—and undeniably winning—eccentricity. The introduction of a doppelgänger is a typically atypical move. Levy doesn’t exactly practice magical realism; her books are too tethered to the practicalities of life to ever be described that way. But her plots turn on weird moments and comical misunderstandings ... What’s thrilling about Levy’s novels is that they are alive with this relentless spirit of questing ... Levy’s feminist critique of the classical-music world is uncharacteristically lumpy. She overworks the theme of a woman forced to master the scores of male geniuses while suppressing her own creativity ... We should call her what she is: one of the most lively, most gratifying novelists of ideas at work today.
