I love using old books like this one to deepen the pleasure of travelling, so that I am not just visiting a place but a time. I picked up my copy for £3 in a charity shop in Glastonbury, and wondered about who had used it all those decades ago. What drew them north? What sights did they enjoy? I want to see Glasgow as that traveller from Somerset might have seen it, and to see what has changed.
Beyond their future imaginings, Pavón’s stories seem to offer some sense of how we might live now, with all the terror and wreckage currently in front of us. Indeed, seizing some beauty or happiness even in ugly things may be one of the few viable strategies still available to us. “Initially we didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,” a narrator says in a story early in the book, upon seeing a menacing cloud on the horizon.
While neither of us said it, we both thought it was probably something toxic: a war, an attack, an explosion at some run-down factory. But at the same time, there was something fascinating about the way the mass cleared a path, painting absurd shapes in the sky in just fractions of a second. It was exciting, because it was strange … and big. And it was in the sky.
This is the heart of the trilogy: this constant nod to past iterations of self that is necessary to the formation of a writer. Levy is preoccupied not just with how to write new, freer versions of female characters, but how to become one.
What We Run the Tides probes so poignantly is the volatility of female adolescence, its on-the-cusp caprices and confusions, as well as the more timeless riddles of independence and identity, seduction and storytelling.
It breaks through voile and stains
like tannin leaching into a cup;