Deborah Levy: “C.S. Lewis’s White Witch terrified me — but I wanted to meet her” | imaginary

My first memory is reading
“The Cat in the Hat” by Dr. Seuss, especially the little red fan that the cat carries at the tip of her tail. When I was five years old, I was reading The Famous Five, learning about Enid Blyton’s most complex characters, Aunt Fanny and Uncle Quentin. I was born in racist South Africa. The children in the Famous Five series had no human rights issues, and the series is set in Dorset, an area I was completely unfamiliar with. My bedroom window in Johannesburg looked out onto a garden of white grass and a peach tree.

My favorite book growing up
I was thrilled to jump into the fantasy development of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. C.S. Lewis’ stroke of luck was to come up with the idea that the wardrobe was the gateway to another world. Although she terrified me, I wanted to meet the White Witch, who was riding a sleigh pulled by white reindeer.

The book that changed me as a teenager
Sherry from Colette. Because of the sex and sadness of aging and desire, which I didn’t quite understand as a 14-year-old, and because it was filmed in France, which I had never been to. It was unusual to read a novel in which the male character’s only strength in life was her beauty. I read it on the bus to school when I was supposed to read John Keats’s poem On the Greek Urn.

The writer who changed my mind
In my forties, it seemed to me that the late, great J. G. Ballard had found an intellectually entertaining way to express his preoccupations and obsessions in his later novels. A novel like Cocaine Nights is about an attractive, tanned tennis coach with perfect white teeth, who works at a Mediterranean resort for expatriates. He’s really a psychopath, but people seem to like him and would vote for him if they had the chance. I saw this as a disingenuous social and psychological critique disguised as a beach novel. I’ve changed my mind about how to move forward with some of my writing preoccupations, a few of which feature beaches and pools.

Books that made me want to be a writer
James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Marguerite Duras’ The Lover remain the defining texts that guide my writing. Why? The depth of the prose, its beauty, its pain, its abundance of wit and high emotion.

The book or author you returned to
I don’t tend to revisit books that I never got around to. We have nothing to say to each other.

The book I re-read
I return to Gaston Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space. His philosophical musings on attics, cellars, corridors, nooks and crannies, doors and nooks are always surprising and inspiring.

The book I discovered later in life
It would really be the book I rediscovered when I was writing my autobiography. I know why the caged bird sings Written by Maya Angelou brings to life her childhood with her formidable grandmother in the brutal and racist American South of the 1930s. The tremendous explosion of Angelou’s writing voice cuts through the most traditional of autobiographies: its truth, its power, its historical reach, and its skillful elevation from life to literature.

The book I’m currently reading
Butter by Asako Yuzuki, a 2017 subversive novel about escaping everyday misogyny. I love the scene in which the narrator, after enduring an exhausting day at work and a night of bad sex, slips out of her boyfriend’s bed at two in the morning to find a place that serves her comforting pasta. With butter, of course.