Deborah Levy is a celebrated novelist, memoirist and playwright whose latest book — “The Position of Spoons” — is a petite collection of essays spanning the last few decades of her career. Though Levy calls the entries in her book “intimacies,” at times that feels like the wrong word, given that she spends more pages writing about the influence of other artists than divulging her own inner world. Some of the entries, lasting just two or three pages, feel incomplete.
The mood here is never too serious, with musings on “Blade Runner” and a retelling of “Alice in Wonderland” that has the White Rabbit bounding through southeast London. There’s not one, but two prose poems structured in an “A to Z” style. The collection brings together many of Levy’s pieces that were previously published elsewhere. Several were written as forwards or introductions to works by other authors, perhaps explaining why their audience never seems to be the reader at hand.
