Things I Don't Want To Know, Deborah Levy
Sheer egoism , aesthetic enthusiasm , historical impulse and political purpose are George Orwell's four motivations for writing, as he articulates them in Why I Write . In Things I Don't Want To Know, Deborah Levy takes these four apocalyptic horsemen and reorders them, tossing them about like pizza dough, as she offers her own, uncompromisingly female, version of why she writes. In the first essay, 'Political Purpose', she reopens a notebook she has held on to, but not written in since 1988, when she went to Poland to write about an avant-garde actress. Irresistibly we are reminded of Doris Lessing's four notebooks, and wonder which one this is most like – black, red, yellow or blue (old depression, Communism, new depression, dreams)? The title of that first essay might draw us towards Orwell or Lessing's Communism, particularly as Levy's own father was a member of the ANC, and particularly as she explicitly calls this her 'Polish notebook...