With this book the author’s “Living Autobiography” series has been completed. I do highly suggest you to read the first two books making it up first, “Things I Don’t Want to Know” and “The Cost of Living“. “Real Estate” once again steadily delivered the author’s remarkable signature style, anecdotes from her life, as well as philosophical reflections on the deep and not so deep moments in life. Whereas in “The Cost of Living” I was really drawn to the part within the narrative when the author spent time living in Paris, here the reflections on the magnetic draw to Greece were the ones that stood out most to me:

That night, in the deep heat of Greece, devoured by mosquitoes and reminiscences, I was thinking about all the doors I had closed in my life and what it would have taken to keep them ajar.

p. 271

The Aegean is the sea of the gods. It is ambrosia. Nectar. Warm but not too warm. It is friendly and it is luscious, like being held by a body that is not too clinging and not too detached. It washes from me the pain of thwarted hope for enduring love, connects me with my mother who taught me to swim, calms my fears about the future, takes the edge off the turbulence of my broken marriage, helps me reach for ideas yet empties my mind, brings me closer to both life and death. I don’t know why, but it does.

p. 288

This book will feel special to those who have experienced the feeling of imagining a real estate that they would like to own themselves one day. The daydreams about it, envisioning it in one’s mind. It could be seen as a wide meditation on the topic. It further explores details within the life of someone having a career as an author, the relationships that develop through one’s life, as well as the most important relationship in one’s life, the one with oneself. In any case, “Real Estate” once again started in a captivating “Levy-esque way”, throwing you straight into the middle of the story, hooking you in to read on:

In the winter of January 2018, I bought a small banana tree from a flower stall outside Shoreditch High Street station. It seduced me with its shivering, wide green leaves, also with the new leaves that were furled up, waiting to stretch out into the world. The woman who sold it to me had long fake eyelashes, blue-black and luscious. In my mind’s eye her lashes stretched all the way from the bagel shops and grey cobblestones of East London to the deserts and mountains of New Mexico.

p. 1

What I do have to say is that this last part of the “Living Autobiography” was the one that I connected with the least out of all three of them. It seemed like there was a strong change of style towards the end, feeling like the last part of the book was written at a different time and didn’t perfectly fit in anymore. I found one typo within it and maybe I had a general overload after reading three books in a row about the author’s life. This is a completely personal perception though and I would recommend you to read the three books with other books in between as breaks. It was still a very enjoyable reading experience, which did add up to a total rating of 4/5 ★ with just a little reduction. It’s passages like this one, which I haven’t read from another author before, which made me build a special bond with this book too:

[…] I did not have a tranquil relationship with language because I am in love with it. I asked myself, what sort of love? Language is a building site. It is always in the process of being constructed and repaired. It can fall apart and be made again.

p. 290

In the end, I do highly suggest this book as well to those who are fans of Deborah Levy’s writing. It was mesmerizing, motivating to reflect on various points in one’s own life and simply a joy to read, being treated to beautiful passages over and over again.

★★★★☆ (4/5)

_{Edition: ISBN 978-0-241-26801-8
Penguin Random House, 2021}