Beautiful Mutants - Hardcover

Deborah Levy was born in 1969, studied theatre at Dartington College of Arts, and now lives in London. Her plays include Pax, which City Limits considered 'remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigour, poetic fantasy and visual imagination' and Heresies for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 'An ambitious, imaginative, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, passage across a terrain where moral parables and folk fancies meet' (Marina Warner, Independent). She has also published a collection of short stories, Ophelia and the Great Idea, and a novel, Beautiful Mutants, and, most recently, Swallowing Geography, all of which are published by Vintage.

Levy's feverishly imagined, opaque and dislocated contemporary allegory is set in London and New York, but occupies an anarchic space all its own. Through the agency of cigar-smoking, stump-toothed Russian exile Lapinski--a woman who is evidently a repository of near-extinct Western Soul--the author summons up a series of grotesques, or "beautiful mutants." They include the Poet who shapes conveyor belt hamburgers; Gemma, the avaricious and violent transsexual Banker; and the (tightrope walking) Anorexic Anarchist who announces herself "an antibody fighting the diseased putrescent body of this society." Sitting as a little fictive bird on the Banker's shoulder, Lapinski is derided by Gemma as a creator of mere fiction, a paltry stratagem for survival in the reality decreed by those like the Banker who are truly--materially--powerful. Poet, playwright ( Heresies ) and short story writer ( Ophelia and the Great Idea ), Levy is an audacious writer, but her startling images lack the cohesive thematic structure required for her novella to succeed.
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