This beautifully written novel is a snapshot into the life of its protagonist and narrator, Sofia, during a short period time that feels pivotal; a time when she finally appreciates herself and her own life really begins.
She’s travelled from London to the south of Spain with her mother, Rose, to get treatment from a private doctor, Gomez, for her mother’s apparent lameness. There she meets Ingrid, a woman with whom she begins a relationship; Juan, who she also hits it off with: and Julieta, Gomez’s daughter.
Not a great deal happens through most of the book, but gradually she realises that for much of her life she’s put everything on hold for her mother: living with her, giving up an anthropology PhD, her relationships, her future.
Things are already shifting for Sofia, but a particular turning point comes when Sofia vists her enstranged father Christos in Greece, meeting his young wife Alexandra (just four years older than Sofia) and their young daughter. In a telling line, during a conversation about money and him supporting his ex-wife Rose, he asks ‘why would I do something to disadvantage myself?’, a point at which Sofia begins to wonder why she does so many things to disadvantage herself.
There’s a lot going on in this short novel. Most explicit is the weight of the relationship between Sofia and her mother, Rose. It seems Rose is likely a hypochondriac, depressed and probably ill too, though not necessarily lame. She’s dependent on Sofia for everything, and gives her no freedom.
Sofia meanwhile encourages this dependency by always being there for Rose, perhaps using Rose as a reason not to do things, even while being resentful of the constrained life she finds herself in as a consequence.
They are close but mutually resentful, as you might find in a relationship where the father is long-gone and there are no siblings.
As a coming of age, or self-realisation, novel, we see Sofia beginning to understand her desires, or if not understand at least succumb to them, allowing herself to act on them, first with Ingrid, then with Juan, later in relation to her intellectual interests.
At a meta level, the book touches on the financial crisis of 2008 and subsequent Europe-wide austerity as it affected Greece especially, but also Italy and Spain. It is at its starkest when Sofia visits her father and his young wife, an economist. He is rich but doesn’t seem willing to share with Sofia, and what’s implied is that the young (Sofia, Alexandra) are giving their lives to look after the old (Christos, Rose), despite the fact that older people have benefitted from an economy that now leaves the young endebted and poorer.
It’s worth saying too that Hot Milk is beautifully written. Its sparse, poetic even, all in the first person, apart from a few telling paragraphs in the third person where someone – Sofia herself? – is looking at herself from the outside, as an anthropologist might look at her subject.
It’s a short novel that feels so intelligent. Every sentence seems to overflow with meaning, as if all the superfluous words have been stripped out and only the meaningful, symbolic and allegoric remain.
Giles book reviews 