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    Black Vodka: Ten Stories
    Black Vodka: Ten Stories
    Black Vodka: Ten Stories
    Ebook100 pages1 hour

    Black Vodka: Ten Stories

    By Deborah Levy

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The stories in Black Vodka, by acclaimed author Deborah Levy, are perfectly formed worlds unto themselves, written in elegant yet economical prose. She is a master of the short story, exploring loneliness and belonging; violence and tenderness; the ephemeral and the solid; the grotesque and the beautiful; love and infidelity; and fluid identities national, cultural, and personal.

    In “Shining a Light,” a woman's lost luggage is juxtaposed with far more serious losses. An icy woman seduces a broken man in “Vienna,” and a man's empathy threatens to destroy him in “Stardust Nation.” “Cave Girl” features a girl who wants to be a different kind of woman-she succeeds in a shocking way. A deformed man seeks beauty amid his angst in the title story.

    These are twenty-first century lives dissected with razor-sharp humor and curiosity. Published simultaneously with Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing, Levy's stories will send you tumbling into a rabbit hole, and you won't be able to scramble out until long after you've turned the last page.

    “Deborah Levy showed she is a top-hitting novelist with a Man Booker Prize shortlist place for Swimming Home. Can she conquer the genre which demands she fashion perfect jewels? . . . Yes, Levy can do macro- and microcosm. These tales of unconventional love reinforce her reputation as a major contemporary writer who never pulls her punches.” -The Independent
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateJun 10, 2014
    ISBN9781620406748
    Black Vodka: Ten Stories
    Author

    Deborah Levy

    Deborah Levy (Johannesburgo, 1959) es una novelis­ta, poeta y dramaturga británica, que ha sido llevada a escena por la Royal Shakespeare Company. Entre sus libros destacan Beautiful Mutants, Swallowing Geography, The Unloved y Swimming Home and Other Stories, que fue finalista de, entre otros pre­mios, el Man Booker en 2012. Con Leche caliente quedó finalista de los premios Man Booker y Goldsmiths en 2016. Foto © Sheila Burnett

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      Book preview

      Black Vodka - Deborah Levy

      Live

      BLACK VODKA

      The first time I met Lisa I knew she was going to help me become a very different sort of man. Knowing this felt like a summer holiday. It made me relax – and I am quite a tense person. There is something you should know about me. I have a little hump on my back, a mound between my shoulder blades. You will notice when I wear a shirt without a jacket that there is more to me than first meets the eye. It’s strange how fascinating human beings find both celebrity and deformity in their own species. People sink their eyes into my hump for six seconds longer than protocol should allow, and try to work out the difference between themselves and me. The boys called me ‘Ali’ at school because that’s what they thought camels were called. Ali Ali Ali. Ali’s got the hump. The word ‘playground’ does not really provide an accurate sense of the sort of ethnic cleansing that went on behind the gates that were supposed to keep us safe. I was instructed in the art of Not Belonging from a very tender age. Deformed. Different. Strange. Go Ho-me Ali, Go Ho-me. In fact I was born in Southend-on-Sea, and so were those boys, but I was exiled to the Arabian Desert and not allowed to smoke with them behind the cockle sheds.

      There is something else you ought to know about me. I write copy for a leading advertising agency. I earn a lot of money and my colleagues reluctantly respect me because they suspect I’m less content than they are. I have made it my professional business to understand that no one respects ruddy-faced happiness.

      I first glimpsed Lisa at the presentation launch for the naming and branding of a new vodka. My agency had won the account for the advertising campaign and I was standing on a small raised stage pointing to a slide of a starry night sky. I adjusted my mic clip and began.

      ‘Black Vodka … ’ I said, slightly sinisterly, ‘vodka Noir, will appeal to those in need of stylish angst. As Victor Hugo might have put it, we are alone, bereft, and the night falls upon us; to drink Black Vodka is to be in mourning for our lives.’

      I explained that vodka was mostly associated with the communist countries of the former Eastern bloc, where it was well known that the exploration of abstract, subjective and conceptual ideas in these regimes was the ultimate defiance of the individual against the state. Black Vodka would hitch a nostalgic ride on all of this and be sold as the edgy choice for the cultured and discerning.

      My colleagues sipped their lattes (the intern had done a Starbucks run) and listened carefully to my angle. When I insisted that Vodka Noir had high cheekbones, a few of the guys laughed uneasily. I am known in the office as the Crippled Poet. Then I noticed someone sitting in the audience, a woman with long brown hair (very blond at the ends) who was not from the agency. She had her arms folded across her grey cashmere sweater; an open notebook lay on her lap. Now and again she’d pick it up and doodle with her pencil. My sharp eyes (long sight) confirmed that this stranger in our small community was observing me rather clinically.

      After the presentation, my colleague Richard introduced me to the woman with the notebook. Although he did not say so, I assumed she was his new girlfriend. Richard is known for splashing his footballer’s body with a heady cologne every morning. ‘West Indian Limes’. Its effect on me is both arousing and desperately melancholy. I could buy five bottles of that seductive cologne tomorrow, yet to draw attention to my damaged body in this way would be to underline its difference from Richard’s. Anyway, it was quite a shock to see him with the woman whose clinical gaze had for some mysterious reason awoken in me the kind of nihilistic lust I was attempting to whip up in my Vodka Noir campaign.

      Richard smiled affectionately at me, apparently amused at something he couldn’t be bothered to explain.

      ‘Lisa is an archaeologist. I thought she’d be interested in your presentation.’

      Her eyes were pale blue.

      ‘Would you buy Black Vodka, Lisa?’

      She told me she would, yes, she would give it a go, and then she screamed because Richard had crept up behind her and his hands were clasping her narrow waist like a handcuff.

      As I put away my laptop, I felt an unwelcome blast of anger. I think I suddenly wanted more than anything else to be a man without a burden on his back. After a presentation we tend to open champagne and instruct the interns to order in snacks. But when I saw a tray of sun-dried tomatoes arranged on tiny, pesto-filled pastry cases, I wanted to punch them onto the floor.

      I left the office early. I even left without asking my boss what he thought of my presentation. Tom Mines is the Cruel Man of the agency (though he would call his cruelty ‘insight’) and he suffers from livid eczema on his wrists and hands. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s always bought jackets with extra-long sleeves. For obvious reasons, I am fascinated by how other people conceal their physical suffering.

      I muttered something about being summoned to an emergency and left quickly before Tom could point out that the emergency was me. But I did not leave before walking straight over to Lisa, aware that Tom Mines had his eye on me, his thin grey fingers twisted around the cuffs of his jacket. What I did next might sound strange: I gave Richard’s girlfriend my card. The surprise she attempted to express with her facial muscles, her raised eyebrows, her mocking lips slightly parted, was really not that convincing because of what I knew. When Lisa was doodling in her notebook, she had let it rest open on her lap. From my position on the raised stage, I could see quite clearly that she had drawn a sketch of me on the left-hand page. A picture of a naked, hunchbacked man, with every single organ of his body labelled. Underneath her rather too accurate portrait (should I be flattered that she imagined me naked?) she’d scribbled two

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