“Wow.”
That was me when my husband, seeing me turn the last page of Levels of Life and close the book, asked me “How was it?” I didn’t elaborate very much except to say, “You really need to read this,” with the added disclaimer, “but you might find it distressing.”
How to describe Levels of Life? The book is divided into three parts: essentially, three essays that spin from the book’s premise, “You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed.” Part one, “The Sin of Height,” is about ballooning in the nineteenth century. Part two, “On the Level,” is about a love affair between actress Sarah Bernhardt and one of her many admirers. As I read these two essays, I thought, “This is all very beautiful, but where is this going?” Where it goes is into the depths of grief; it punches you in the gut with a raw analysis of the author’s own personal loss, making everything that came before it even more beautiful and heartbreaking.
This is going to be a short review; at 128 pages, you can read the book in a day (maybe three, if you want to stretch it out to one essay per sitting). It’s a book about love and loss, and how putting two things, two people, together that haven’t been put together before, can often create something more wonderful than you could have imagined. The losses in life can be devastating, but that wouldn’t be the case if there weren’t something spectacular to lose.
Last year I reviewed Julian Barnes’s A Sense of an Ending and thought it was thoroughly wonderful. I’ve always been more partial to Barnes’s short stories and essays than to his novels, so it’s not surprising that Levels of Life would rank, in my opinion, as one of his best works. Go read it. Now.