Deborah Levy: Augustblau

Elsa, a famous blue-haired concert pianist, is performing Rachmaninoff on stage in Vienna. Only two minutes into the concerto, however, she stops playing, stands up and walks off stage. What happened? At the peak of her career, Elsa sets off across Europe to find the missing pieces of her shattered identity and «write her own composition». At a flea market in Athens, a young woman buys a pair of mechanical dancing horses she wanted herself, but there are none left. The unknown woman remains a voice in Elsa’s head on her erratic flight from her own prodigious talent and her past. In August Blue, Deborah Levy creates a restive and endearing protagonist who makes up her mind to leave her past life behind, only to resurface and tell her own story.