THE COST OF LIVING
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THE COST OF LIVING
This book is subtle, mundane, and some of you might say boring. I loved it. In The Cost of LivingLevy depicts how she is reshaping her life in her early fifties after a divorce, the sequential loss of the family house (and work space), the upbringing of two teenagers, her writing, and her mother’s death. What Levy does extraordinarily well is render the everyday through the prism of metaphor, language, and ritual to give herself and her readers exactly what we all need: meaning.
Sometimes it's the simple and obvious that hits the hardest: "It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world too. He had taken a risk when he invited her to join him at his table. After all, she came with a whole life and libido of her own. It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself the minor character and him the major character." Haven't we all been there? But few articulate a thought like Levy between pages 1 & 4.
Combining her meditations with the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Kierkegaard, and many others she enters into conversations that become theoretically compelling. Levy takes inspiration from Louise Bourgeois (attempting to repair the past with art) and finds comfort in Proust: "Ideas comes to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart."
It is heartening to read a testimony that chaos not only or necessarily implies disaster but offers a chance to change too, an affirmation that one can rebuild one’s life after it has fallen apart – and resurface.
As we know, it can be refreshing, rewarding to read a book so full of someone else. This book is all Levy, but her words are for us. I'm recommending The Cost of Living because I trust her words will land with you, too.
Written by So Textual
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