Empty Words

by Mario Levrero, Annie McDermott (Translator)

Overview

From a legendary cult figure in Latin American literature, the story of a writer who obsessively observes his own handwriting in search of answers about his identity.

An eccentric novelist begins to keep a notebook of handwriting exercises, hoping that if he’s able to improve his penmanship, his personal character will also improve. What begins as a mere physical exercise becomes involuntarily colored by humorous reflections and tender anecdotes about living, writing, and the sense—or nonsense—of existence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566895460
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	05/21/2019
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Mario Levrero was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1940 and died there in 2004. Levrero was a photographer, bookseller, comics script writer, humorist, crossword author, creator of brain games. In his later years, he directed a literary workshop. Empty Words is his first novel translated and published in English.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Empty Words

“[A] teasing jeu d'esprit . . . As a calling card for Levrero’s talent, it’s certainly enticing.” —The Guardian

“Reading his exercises is relaxing, like sitting at the kitchen table and chatting with a friend . . . charmingly, haplessly funny.” —NPR

“A very funny satire on the realistic novel . . . [a] brilliant little tour de force.” —The Star Tribune

“Empty Words contains two threads: the handwriting exercises (complete with distractions) and what Levrero calls ‘The Discourse,’ which has the stated aim of being about nothing.” —Rain Taxi

"Levrero writes, on the whole, with lightness, economy and precision, and throughout the book the predominant tone – beautifully captured by Annie McDermott’s elegant translation – is one of appealing curiosity and bemused wonder." —The National

“More than just an exercise in chasing his own tail, Levrero takes himself into dangerous psychological territory, wrestling with the things that underlie his loopy a’s.” —Kirkus

“There is a tenderness and honesty in Levrero’s work: Empty Words is a sincere offering, a gentle yet thorough contemplation of life’s immensities.” —The Typescript

“A lighthearted wisdom beats in every sentence of Empty Words, a little masterpiece by Mario Levrero, who is, to me, one of the funniest and most influential writers of recent times.” —Alejandro Zambra

“We are all his children.” —Álvaro Enrigue

“An eccentric, funny, and original novel: philosophical but playful, short but obsessive, ironic but desperate, and theoretical but intimate.” —Dana Spiotta

“Of all [Levrero's] works, Empty Words is the best means of accessing this singular author, who continues to gain followers and whose reputation has long since outgrown the niche reserved for cult authors.” —Ignacio Echevarría

“In short, the title of Empty Words is deceptive. On the contrary, it is full. Full of the mystery that is the irrational side of the act of writing.” —Transfuge

“A very funny, very sad reflection on the ways people try (and fail) to simplify their lives.”  —The Millions

“An intense form of introspection that has nothing to do with the usual narcissism of the world of letters.” —Le Matricule des Anges

“A humorous story, tinged with eroticism and interspersed with calligraphic exercises.” —Livres Hebdo

“One can take this genre as a diary, as a novel entirely imagined, as an autobiographical or purely psychological analysis, ‘an act of self-construction’ . . . A Cartesian mind who wishes to decide would deprive himself of the healthy freedom that Mario Levrero offers him.” —Nouveaux Espaces Latinos

[Empty Words] is a concentrate of Uruguayan humor, and the narrator, busy perfecting his upstrokes and downstrokes, almost forgets to have something to say.” —L’Obs

From the Publisher

2019-06-17
Change your handwriting, change your life: an enigmatic 1996 novel, his first to be translated into English, by Uruguayan writer Levrero.

In Latin America, there's a literary saw that says that Mexico produces novelists, Chile poets, and Uruguay "strange ones." So notes translator McDermott in her scene-setting introduction to this slender story à clef, in which Levrero recounts trying to make his handwriting more calligraphic and, by improving it, to alter bad habits and become an altogether better person. The problem is the solution: He tries to write "empty words," words chosen simply for their power to test the musculature of composition, say with lots of instances of the troublesome letter r in them. By not lifting the pen from the page, Levrero writes, "I think this will help me improve my concentration and the continuity of my thoughts, which are currently all over the place." Write he does, scattered thoughts and all, and amid the humdrum, meaningful compositions begin to emerge, unbidden, tempting the author "to turn my calligraphical prose into narrative prose, with the idea of building a series of texts that, like the steps of a staircase, would carry me back up to those longed-for heights I was once able to reach." More than just an exercise in chasing his own tail, Levrero takes himself into dangerous psychological territory, wrestling with the things that underlie his loopy a's: anxiety builds, he smokes like a chimney, he bloats and becomes listless—and then comes, if not a breakthrough, at least the emergence of some interesting if sometimes unpleasant sketches, marked by second thoughts, strike-throughs, revisions, and other such signs of the alchemy that is writing. Vita contemplativa, vita scripta: What Levrero learns about himself, in the end, is of universal application, and while it's not necessarily cheerful, it allows him to proceed "by means of a kind of spiritual acrobatics."

A curious, even eccentric book, and a must-read for fans of post-boom Latin American literature.

Kirkus Reviews