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Things I Don't Want to Know
- Author
- Deborah Levy
- Narrator
- Henrietta Meire
- Publisher
- Highbridge Company
- Publish Date
- 30 November 2021
- Run Time
- 2 hours 39 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
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, fifteen, and fifty), Things I Don't Want to Know brings the listener into a writer's heart.
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Details
- Author
- Deborah Levy
- Narrator
- Henrietta Meire
- Duration
- 2 hours 39 minutes
- Release Date
- 30 November 2021
- ISBN
- 9781696605649
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Highbridge Company
- Genre
- Biography: general, Gender studies: women and girls, Biography: writers, Memoirs
Synopsis
A shimmering jewel of a book about writing from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah LevyBlending 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, fifteen, and fifty), Things I Don't Want to Know brings the listener into a writer's heart.
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