Mind Picker: Hot Milk

My mother had tried to keep it together for a while. She taught herself how to make salty goat's cheese for my father I remember I remember, warming the milk, adding the yogurt, stirring in the rennet, cutting the curds, doing something with muslin and brine, pickling cheese in jars. She put herbs on the lamb she roasted for him, herbs she had never heard of in Warter, Yorkshire, but when he left she could not pay the bills with herbs and cheese I remember, I do remember, she had to walk out of the kitchen and do something else, I remember she turned the oven off and put her coat on and she opened the front door and there was a wolf waiting for us on the mat but she chased it away and found a job and her lips were not puckered, her eyelashes were not curled when she sat in the library day after day indexing books, but her hair was always perfect and it was held up with one pin.

I've been thinking on Hot Milk since I finished it over a day ago, and it's a strange read to pin down: at once both oddly dreamlike in its treatment of a mother-daughter story and specific in the details that anchor it to modern Europe, it's hard for me to even separate whether it was the brooding atmosphere or the eccentric plot details that are most lingering in my mind. It's not so much that the protagonist Sophia is an unreliable narrator as, at twenty-five and prevented from growing up, she's not yet fully formed: there's frequent gender confusion and sexual fluidity and reversals of family roles, and since Sophia doesn't quite know where she fits into the world, neither does the reader; is she selfless or monstrous? Can a person be both? I don't mean to make this book sound confusing or inaccessible – this odd atmosphere is an earned achievement by author Deborah Levy and Hot Milk is a worthy title on the 2016 Man Booker prize longlist.

I am in a reckless mood after my bold night of lovemaking under the real stars. I want to sit here with a lover, close, closer, touching. Instead I am here with my mother, who is a sort of career invalid. I am young and might even be the subject of erotic dreams newly minted by Juan, who had said, 'The dream is over', when we first met. And I might be beloved to Ingrid, who is tormenting me.

As the book opens, Sophia and her mother Rose have travelled from England to a dusty seaside town in Spain in order to seek treatment at the nearby Gómez Clinic: Sophia has been taking care of her hypochondriac mother since her father left when she was just five, and now that Rose says she can no longer feel her feet, the pair has remortgaged the family home in order to offer up €50k in the hopes of a last ditch miracle cure. Sophia is an Anthropology student (her PhD is on hold for now as she works as a barista in a gourmet cafe; sleeping in its storeroom during the week; at her mother's house on weekends), and she can't help but evaluate everything she sees in terms of social constructs and kinship systems and other jargony words. When they finally meet Dr Gómez, Rose fears he is a quack: he takes her off her long list of medications for her various complaints (leaving Rose waiting in shivery anticipation for the pains that never come) and seems more interested in Rose's (and Sophia's) mental state than her physical: is this worth blowing Sophia's meagre inheritance?

Meanwhile, the glimpse we get of the women's home life is not a pleasant one: Rose is forever demanding glasses of water (and the water is always “wrong” whether Sophia fetches it from the kettle or the fridge; whether sparkling or still), and despite being able to shuffle along sometimes, Rose insists that her much smaller daughter carry her from house to wheelchair to car. And while this looks totally abusive, Sophia leaves her mother alone most of the time to go swimming in the medusa-infested sea, to meet with various lovers, even to take a trip to Greece to visit her estranged father and his new family: just what is Rose supposed to do with all these empty hours and days? Especially if she claims to prefer staring at a blank wall to even looking out the window at the night sky? Sophia appears to both believe and disbelieve in her mother's incapacitation at the same time, and when even her (new, casual) lover Ingrid refers to Sophia as a monster more than once (is she “beloved” or something more “violent”?), I began to wonder if I wasn't too trusting in taking Sophia at her word: does she play along with the family drama just to delay taking responsibility for her own life? While from her perspective – at least in what she shares with the reader – Sophia seems to have no power in her relationship with Ingrid (or Rose), is she actually the one in charge?

At night the marble dome of the Gómez Clinic resembled a spectral, solitary breast illuminated by the lights hidden in the surrounding succulents. A maternal lighthouse perched on the mountain, its veined, milky marble thrusting out of the purple sea lavender. A nocturnal breast, serene but sinister under the bright night stars.

This book is full of breasts (full of Hot Milk) and cigars and dreams and other Freudian imagery (when it comes down to it, is Sophia trying to save her mother or [metaphorically] kill her?); it subtly (but often) references Greek mythology; and, more concretely, it references austerity economics and how that is affecting the Greek and Spanish societies. But at its heart, this is a book about mother-daughter relationships and how that dynamic might be subverted by a mother who wants to be babied and a daughter who resists growing up. This was a fascinating and unusual read and I'm glad to have picked it up.