Overview

Widely viewed as one of the most inventive bodies of work from 20th-century Latin America, Mario Levrero's writing is distinguished by its bounteous imagination. In none other of the author's books is this imagination so clearly on display as in The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, his 1970 debut collection of stories. It gathers a variety of Levrero's earliest and most formally inventive publications, ranging from dazzling single paragraph micro-fictions la Donald Barthelme to adventurous Lewis Carroll-esque tales of forty pages' length. From the shocking surreal twists of 'Beggar Street' to the Escher-like grammatical maze of 'The Boarding House', via the pseudo-fairy tale classic 'The Basement', this book explores uncanny domestic spaces, using the structures of the stories themselves as tools for re-inventing narrative possibility.

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9781916751064

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Reviews

"""Stories that play with space, an absurd space when looked at with logic. And that is exactly the challenge that Levrero sets the reader: to read from their imagination, from that place where anything is possible, where fears, phobias and obsessions have free rein."" --Tati Jurado, El libro durmiente Praise for the Author ""Levrero is an author who challenges the canonical idea of Latin American literature. If you really want to complete the puzzle of our tradition, you must read him."" --Juan Pablo Villalobos, Granta ""We are all his children."" --Álvaro Enrigue ""Levrero is Kafka's 'everyday' flip side, a shadow of Camus with a comical take."" --El País 

""Style and imagination like Levrero's are rare in Spanish-language literature."" --Antonio Muñoz Molina 

 ""Mario Levrero is a genius."" --Rodolfo Fogwill 



""Mario Levrero is the great discovery of the century for Latin American literature."" --Revista Ñ Praise for The Luminous Novel ""The diary may be a museum of unfinished stories, but a story, The Luminous Novel shows, doesn't need to be finished to have its own meanings -- the largest of which may be that the transcendental experience Levrero is after has been visible all along."" --Adam Thirlwell, New York Times Book Review ""An affecting and hilariously digressive account of the anxieties of the creative process."" --Ángel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times Books of the Year ""A novel upon which cults are founded."" --Dustin Illingworth, New Left Review ""It compels our attention. More than this: as it lurches on in its awkward, clumsy way, with all the grace of a circus bear negotiating a tightrope, it grips our imagination in ways we cannot readily pin down . . . an improbably enthralling reading experience."" --Times Literary Supplement ""A novel about being in tune with the details of life that are most freaky-deaky, most humdrum, most comical, and most enraging. [...] This is a lengthy book with no plot, and I read the whole thing despite how it conflicted with my economic interests (see intro [re reading slowly]). That's the endorsement, and I'm sticking to it."" --Vulture ""The diary may be a museum of unfinished stories, but a story, this book shows, doesn't need to be finished to have its own meanings--the largest of which may be that the transcendental experience Levrero is after has been visible all along."" --Adam Thirlwell, New York Times Book Review ""This is procrastination as high art. Levrero makes the quotidian seem extraordinary. You may not think you're interested in the purchase of a new armchair, but it's described here with such surprising humour and drama that its significance begins to feel cosmic . . . The Luminous Novel was originally published in Spanish in 2005, a year after the author's death. This knowledge of mortality makes his continual terror that time is slipping through his fingers yet more poignant. Every wasted moment in this book feels precious."" --Sam Jordison, The Guardian ""This is the latest posthumously translated novel from the Uruguayan Levrero, whose Montevideo apartment was, to quote his translator McDermott, ""the centre of a small universe...his legendary literary workshops, which followed an 'unmethodical method' designed to put people in touch with their imagination, produced hundreds of students who consider themselves his disciples."" Here, a novelist receives a generous grant that produces an insuperable writer's block. As with Empty Words, in which the protagonist attempts 'graphological self-therapy' (handwriting exercises) to better himself, this is a digressive, Sternean tale in which interruption becomes a kind of illumination."" --The Millions, 'Most Anticipated' ""There's no getting around that this is a rather long novel in which relatively little happens; this is not necessarily trying for the reader - even at it's most everyday-mundane, the diary, for example, is a quite amusing read--but this is a novel which certainly does take its good time. [...] An expansive chronicle of what is ostensibly a failure--the inability to write what the author conceives of as a 'luminous novel'--, The Luminous Novel succeeds. There is a lot to this work."" --Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review ""A masterwork ... Levrero's big problem, consuming him throughout the book, is that he's won a Guggenheim fellowship to write a novel that is overly ambitious to the point of being impossible. ... Levrero delights in not meeting his obligation to Guggenheim ... Fans of Perec, Coover, and other experimentalists will enjoy Levrero's epic struggle not to write this book."" --Kirkus, starred review ""The contradictions between how he experiences his life and how he lives it become evident, as does his obliviousness to the gap in his perception, even when it stares him in the face. Because of this fractured perspective, his story becomes universal . . . The Luminous Novel is a postmodern novel about the contradictions of everyday life, in which an author's struggle reveals that life is what happens when we are busy doing other things."" --Foreword Reviews ""This is literature in the same way that John Cage's 4'33"" is music."" --Publishers Weekly ""An affecting and hilariously digressive account of the anxieties of the creative process."" --Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times Books of the Year ""Through his accumulated diary entries, we gain a sense of Levrero as a whole. Annie McDermott has done an excellent job of translating his unique tone of voice, which can be by turns, witty, metaphysical, self-deprecating and obscure."" --Brian Davey, Dublin Review of Books ""From domestic distractions to doubt and crippling insomnia, never has a book about the repetitious banality of the process of writing a novel - or, in fact avoiding writing a novel - been so compelling and accurately rendered. Mario Levrero turns the act of procrastination into a supreme art form."" --Benjamin Myers ""The Luminous Novel could qualify as a new instalment in the literature of boredom, except that it's too charmingly, haplessly funny to be boring."" --Lily Meyer, NPR ""The Luminous Novel is Levrero's greatest work, which he wrote by forcing himself to write it, knowing beforehand that what he wanted to write was impossible. That's why, instead of the novel, he narrates the distractions that sidetrack him from the novel. It's not so surprising that the happiest moment in The Luminous Novel is when Mario Levrero manages, finally, to fix Word 2000. Surely, fixing Word 2000 is easier than writing that unfathomable novel that Levrero writes but doesn't write. But to write the luminous novel it is necessary to pass through the dark novel; to make true literature it is crucial to turn to, as he says, fraudulent literature. Novel without a novel; literature without literature."" --Alejandro Zambra"

"""Stories that play with space, an absurd space when looked at with logic. And that is exactly the challenge that Levrero sets the reader: to read from their imagination, from that place where anything is possible, where fears, phobias and obsessions have free rein."" --Tati Jurado, El libro durmiente Praise for the Author ""Levrero is an author who challenges the canonical idea of Latin American literature. If you really want to complete the puzzle of our tradition, you must read him."" --Juan Pablo Villalobos, Granta ""We are all his children."" --�lvaro Enrigue Praise for The Luminous Novel ""The diary may be a museum of unfinished stories, but a story, The Luminous Novel shows, doesn't need to be finished to have its own meanings -- the largest of which may be that the transcendental experience Levrero is after has been visible all along."" --Adam Thirlwell, New York Times Book Review ""An affecting and hilariously digressive account of the anxieties of the creative process."" --�ngel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times Books of the Year ""A novel upon which cults are founded."" --Dustin Illingworth, New Left Review ""It compels our attention. More than this: as it lurches on in its awkward, clumsy way, with all the grace of a circus bear negotiating a tightrope, it grips our imagination in ways we cannot readily pin down . . . an improbably enthralling reading experience."" --Times Literary Supplement ""A novel about being in tune with the details of life that are most freaky-deaky, most humdrum, most comical, and most enraging. [...] This is a lengthy book with no plot, and I read the whole thing despite how it conflicted with my economic interests (see intro [re reading slowly]). That's the endorsement, and I'm sticking to it."" --Vulture ""This is procrastination as high art. Levrero makes the quotidian seem extraordinary. You may not think you're interested in the purchase of a new armchair, but it's described here with such surprising humour and drama that its significance begins to feel cosmic . . . The Luminous Novel was originally published in Spanish in 2005, a year after the author's death. This knowledge of mortality makes his continual terror that time is slipping through his fingers yet more poignant. Every wasted moment in this book feels precious."" --Sam Jordison, The Guardian"

"""Stories that play with space, an absurd space when looked at with logic. And that is exactly the challenge that Levrero sets the reader: to read from their imagination, from that place where anything is possible, where fears, phobias and obsessions have free rein."" --Tati Jurado, El libro durmiente Praise for the Author ""Levrero is an author who challenges the canonical idea of Latin American literature. If you really want to complete the puzzle of our tradition, you must read him."" --Juan Pablo Villalobos, Granta ""We are all his children."" --Álvaro Enrigue Praise for The Luminous Novel ""The diary may be a museum of unfinished stories, but a story, The Luminous Novel shows, doesn't need to be finished to have its own meanings -- the largest of which may be that the transcendental experience Levrero is after has been visible all along."" --Adam Thirlwell, New York Times Book Review ""An affecting and hilariously digressive account of the anxieties of the creative process."" --Ángel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times Books of the Year ""A novel upon which cults are founded."" --Dustin Illingworth, New Left Review ""It compels our attention. More than this: as it lurches on in its awkward, clumsy way, with all the grace of a circus bear negotiating a tightrope, it grips our imagination in ways we cannot readily pin down . . . an improbably enthralling reading experience."" --Times Literary Supplement ""A novel about being in tune with the details of life that are most freaky-deaky, most humdrum, most comical, and most enraging. [...] This is a lengthy book with no plot, and I read the whole thing despite how it conflicted with my economic interests (see intro [re reading slowly]). That's the endorsement, and I'm sticking to it."" --Vulture ""This is procrastination as high art. Levrero makes the quotidian seem extraordinary. You may not think you're interested in the purchase of a new armchair, but it's described here with such surprising humour and drama that its significance begins to feel cosmic . . . The Luminous Novel was originally published in Spanish in 2005, a year after the author's death. This knowledge of mortality makes his continual terror that time is slipping through his fingers yet more poignant. Every wasted moment in this book feels precious."" --Sam Jordison, The Guardian"

Author Information

Mario Levrero was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1940 and died there in 2004. Levrero was a photographer, bookseller, comics scriptwriter, humorist, crossword author, and creator of brain games. He wrote twelve novels and several short story collections and it was not long before he gained cult status amongst readers in Uruguay and Argentina, despite keeping a low profile. He has inspired Latin American writers such as Rodolfo Fogwill, Csar Aira and Alejandro Zambra. In 2000 he was awarded the Guggenheim grant that allowed him to complete work on The Luminous Novel, which was published posthumously.

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