Waiting for Mario
Reviews
By Wilson McBee
Two years ago, Empty Words became the first novel by the lauded Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero to appear in English. In that delightfully confounding book, a character not unlike Levrero himself attempts to reorder his life by improving his handwriting. Empty Words unfolds in a series of handwriting “exercises” in which the narrator tries to write about nothing only to fall into various literary reflections on subjects including his marriage, his dog, and his mother. The result is equal parts private journal, philosophical discourse, and extended improvisation—a concoction that, even in our current autofiction-saturated environment, feels vibrantly unique.
Now we have the second in what, with luck, will be a steady stream of Levrero works emerging in English. The Luminous Novel is often said to be the author’s masterpiece. It was first published in 2005, a year after Levrero’s death. Like Empty Words, it has been translated by Annie McDermott. Also like that earlier work, The Luminous Novel hinges on a conceit that is tedious, absurd, and charming all at once. The book’s first four hundred and fifty pages are devoted to a “prologue” in which Levrero attempts to explain why he has been unable to finish a manuscript entitled “The Luminous Novel.” Only after this extensive introduction, written in the same diaristic style as Empty Words, do we arrive at the “real” novel, which takes up the book’s final hundred pages.
This bizarre scenario comes from life. In 2000, Levrero was awarded a Guggenheim grant that would pay his living expenses for a year while allowing him time to finish “The Luminous Novel,” which he had begun writing some fifteen years previously. So the first entry, dated August 2000, details the methodology behind the “Diary of the Grant”: “The aim is to set the writing in motion, no matter what it’s about, and keep it up until I’ve got into the habit . . . Every day, every day, even if it’s only a line to say I don’t feel like writing anything, or I don’t have time, or to make any other excuse. But it has to be every day.”
Following this burst of resolution, the narrator—for purposes of convenience, I’ll refer to him hereafter as Mario, since he is obviously based on the author even though he goes unnamed in the book—proceeds to discuss the electrical work he’s having done in his apartment and a book by the Spanish author Rosa Chacel he’s begun reading. And so it goes for him, and for his readers, for the next four hundred-plus pages, as poor Mario’s attempts to produce literature are continually thwarted by his attendance to the stirrings of life’s minutiae. But the ingenious trick of The Luminous Novel is how it squares the circle by turning life’s minutiae into literature.
Although he has definite shut-in and misanthropic tendencies, the sixty-year-old Mario leads a life that is far from solitary or monotonous. First, there are the regular writing workshops he conducts in his Montevideo apartment. There are also visits from his friend and former lover, Chl, as well as from his doctor (who is also his ex-wife) and other friends and acquaintances. He takes regular excursions through the Uruguayan capital where he lives, depicted here as a languorous network marked by cafés, pickpockets, and bookstalls, the latter of which provides his steady diet of mystery novels. But much of the substance of Mario’s life comes from within. Among the topics regularly catalogued in the diary are Mario’s dreams, his aches and pains, and his opinions on books and music—it will likely be a while before I can fully appreciate the music of Beethoven after having been subjected to Mario’s repeated, and hilarious, diatribes against the composer (“clumsy crashing around, which has always reminded me of a child banging a drum at siesta time”; “manic and unhinged”; “like a nightmare”).
Mario’s penchant for disclosure invites the reader into the role of guardian angel or nosy parent. You find yourself rooting for him to make the right choices and get his act together only to be crushingly disappointed when he fails to come through. One of Mario’s most self-destructive habits is staying up all night doing nothing. He plays solitaire on his computer, creates unnecessary programs in Visual Basic, and pretty much anything else besides writing. At the end of every binge, he vows to go to sleep early the next night. But then you read the time stamp at the beginning of the following entry and discover that once again Mario is concluding his “Monday” at around six a.m. on Tuesday. It’s hard to resist the impulse to clutch him by the collar and give him a good talking-to: Now look here, Mario, this won’t do. Forget finishing the novel, you’ll kill yourself if you continue to burn the midnight oil like this! By the same token, on the rare occasions when he does go to sleep at a reasonable hour, or when he achieves some other minor accomplishment like installing a functioning air conditioner or successfully defragging his hard drive, you want to leap for joy.
Threaded among these daily exertions are startlingly gorgeous passages in which Levrero, like Gene Kelly waltzing with a mop, imbues the mundane with poetry. For example, his blow-by-blow description of the actions of a bereaved pigeon pulsate with a terrible poignancy. (The author here is greatly aided by Annie McDermott’s incisive translation.)
I thought she was going to begin the courtship ritual, but she didn’t. She paced up and down a little and then hopped onto the corpse, first the tail and then the chest. I thought she was going to start pecking the dead bird, but she didn’t do that either. She did the last thing I was expecting: hopped back onto the paving stones and sat down. She sat down. I mean: she didn’t stay standing with her legs upright, but rather adopted the posture of a broody hen, as if she were sitting on some eggs, with her legs hidden under her body and her chest resting on the paving stones. And there she stayed . . . There was something quite moving about the way the widow had settled herself there; something snug and affectionate, and homelike, or nest-like. All it needed was for her to start knitting.
Are Mario’s observations of the pigeons simply passing observations, touched by lyricism, or do they signal something about the novelist’s central preoccupations? One of the joys, and challenges, of The Luminous Novel is the way that it invites questions about its own composition. In other words, the book teaches the reader how it is meant to be read.
At various moments, Mario reviews his diary and reflects on its viability as a literary product in its own right, conceding in one instance that “even if it is badly written, I think it’s an interesting read. I’ll have to edit the style a bit, give it some substance.” This sort of coy reflexiveness is enough to drive the attuned reader crazy with curiosity. Which are the edited passages, and which are the “real” diary entries? How does one disentangle Mario the hapless diarist from Levrero the master novelist? As McDermott observes in her translator’s afterword, however, to insist on such categories is to misunderstand Levrero completely: “He was adamant that what took place in his imagination was no less real than what took place in ‘so-called objective reality.’” The Mario that exists in the pages of The Luminous Novel is the only one that matters.
Despite its length, The Luminous Novel is somehow not a slog. Helped by Levrero’s understated humor and gentle self-deprecation, I eased quickly into Mario’s world. That said, and at the risk of discouraging some readers from ever picking up the book, I must admit to being underwhelmed by the “real novel” that follows the “diary of the grant.” The final section is written in a kind of pompous, ponderous style that comes off as watered-down Sebald. I have to think that Levrero couldn’t not include this part, even if he realized that in all his handwringing over finishing “The Luminous Novel,” he was already in the midst of producing another luminous novel out of the detritus of his distracted, incredibly fertile mind.
Wilson McBee lives in Highland Park, Illinois, and is currently at work on a novel.
More Reviews