Things I Don't Want to Know

On Writing

De: Deborah Levy

Narrado por: Henrietta Meire

A shimmering jewel of a book about writing from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy

Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory into a luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss, Things I Don't Want to Know is Deborah Levy's witty response to George Orwell's influential essay "Why I Write." Orwell identified four reasons he was driven to hammer at his typewriter - political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism, and aesthetic enthusiasm - and Levy's work riffs on these same commitments from a female writer's perspective.

As she struggles to balance womanhood, motherhood, and her writing career, Levy identifies some of the real-life experiences that have shaped her novels, including her family's emigration from South Africa in the era of apartheid; her teenage years in the UK; and her theater-writing days touring Poland in the midst of Eastern Europe's economic crisis, where she observed how a soldier tenderly kissed the women in his life goodbye.

Spanning continents (Africa and Europe) and decades (we meet the writer at seven, 15, and 50), Things I Don't Want to Know brings the listener into a writer's heart.

©2013 Deborah Levy (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Very interesting book

A very interesting book. Whether the events were true or creative exaggerations of true events, I always wanted to find out what events or observations by the narrator lay in wait for me on the next page.