The Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero

 

  

When it comes to literature, Uruguay produces the weird ones - and Mario Levrero wrote some of the weirdest works of fiction in all of Latin America, the novel under review, The Luminous Novel, serves as case in point.

Similar to the novels by American poet Ben Lerner, Mario Levrero is all about voice.  It doesn't matter how seemingly trivial or mundane the subject, anything from playing games on the computer to observing the movement of ants in his garden, what makes The Luminous Novel shine is authorial voice. 

However, Mario Levrero's voice is not at all like Ben Lerner's poetic, quasi-baroque voice.  Indeed, as translator Annie McDermott conveyed in an interview: "Levrero isn't pretentious; for Levrero, writing should be down to earth, not flowery or elaborate or anything resembling stuffy."   

Additionally, as per Annie: "Levrero is earnest, he tries hard to be understood but at the same time he's ironic, he recognizes the humor in attempting to communicate to others one's innermost feelings and perceptions."  It's this combination of earnestness and irony that makes The Luminous Novel such a compelling read, a comic novel Levrero himself described as "a monument to failure."   

A monument to failure - why would Levrero say such a thing?   Here's the skinny: back in the 1980s when  Levrero was in his 40s, he typed out the preliminary pages for what he envisioned eventually would become The Luminous Novel. Then in 2000, Levrero received a Guggenheim grant to complete his work.  But he couldn't do it.  Rather, he kept a journal documenting all the reasons and details why he couldn't do it.  The result is the book published in English for the first time by And Other Stories consisting of a 400 page Prologue: Diary of the Grant followed by 100 pages of Mario's original six chapters entitled The Luminous Novel.   

To share direct hits of Mario Levrero's highly distinctive, instantly recognizable authorial voice, take a gander at these quotes -  

"Absolutely zero interest in writing today.  I woke up already feeling a bit crooked, i.e. with that unsteadiness I'd forgotten about and which must therefore relate to my blood pressure, since it went away when I started taking the medication last month."

"And then I also talk about trivial things and it really is a way of relaxing.  Of course, afterwards I have to throw myself into some complicated program on the computer, because my mind flounders if it's not doing something complicated.  The mind is like a set of teeth that has to be chewing all the time."

"And the grant?  I imagine some impertinent reader, the sort there inevitably is, will be thinking: "Did they give this guy a load of cash just so he could play Golf (and Minesweeper - a new habit) and entertain himself with Visual Basic?  Outrageous.  And he calls it a "diary of the grant".'  Reader, relax.  It will take me a while to change my ways."

"On the other hand, the luminous moments, described in isolation, would be indistinguishable from a life-affirming article in Selections from Reader's Digest, and the thoughts that inevitably accompanied them would only make matters worse." 

"What I'm going to say next should be taken literally; it's not symbolic, it's not a way of saying something else, and it's not an attempt to be poetic. It's a fact, and anyone who doesn't believe me should please leave immediately and stop besmirching my text with their slippery gaze - and never, ever try reading one of my books again."  

"It's pointless.  I can't go on with this novel.  I woke up today in a terrible rage, eyes bloodshot, fingers trembling with the desire to rip the two copies and the original of the first chapter to shreds.  Not because I think what I've written so far is definitively and irredeemably awful, but because i feel certain I won't be able to continue..."

The above snips focus on Mario's writing and Mario's states of mind.  Actually, equally engaging are the many times Mario turns his attention outward, to his girlfriend Chl, to his writing students, to his shutters or refrigerator needing repair, to the books he's reading, mostly detective novels, to the activity of pigeons, to the movement of various types of ants, to oodles of other encounters.  For instance, here's Mario recounting a particular kind of wasp which is an expert spider-hunter:  

"These wasps paralyze their prey and then stab it with their rear stinger, injecting fertilized eggs into its body - while the spider is still alive and paralyzed - and then leave it there.  When the larvae hatch from the egg, they feed on the spider's body until it's completely destroyed in the most diabolical torture technique Nature has ever invented."  

With Levrero, all of existence is seen as a life and death struggle infused with spiritual significance, Eros and Thanatos in full bloom. 

As Adam Thirlwell noted in his incisive New York Times review: "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, in this diary of everyday disaster."

How profound, how luminous is Levrero's novel?  Think of that universally recognized masterpiece, a novel published in 1920 chronicling  a single day in the city of Dublin. I can imagine I'll be accused of gross overstatement but, for me, by taking his everyday reality - things like spending hours at his computer playing games and watching pornography, fretting over the effects of his medications, dealing with toothache, back pain and bouts of depression, observing insects in his garden and pigeons outside his window, answering his phone, setting time aside for friends, making trips to the local grocery store, plotting his work schedule, Levrero captures life 'empty to the brim' (Annie McDermott's pithy, zen-line phrase) and, in so doing, just might qualify on a certain level as our 21st century counterpart to Joyce's Ulysses.    

Lastly, worth highlighting: my reading schedule changed radically as I initially intended to read about five pages a day over the course of months, but once I started, I fell completely and totally under the author's magic spell and entered something akin to a trance state, so much so I read The Luminous Novel hours at a time and finishing much sooner than I anticipated.  Levrero wasn't joking when he said a work of art should be a form of hypnosis.  The Luminous Novel qualifies as prime example. 

"Dear Mr. Guggenheim. I hope you're aware of my efforts, as recorded in this diary, to improve my bad habits, at least some of them, and at least to the extent that these habits prevent me from devoting myself fully to the project of writing the novel you have so generously financed. You will have seen, sir, that I'm doing all that's humanly possible, but I'm forever crashing into the pile of rubble that I myself once tipped into my path....
Well, I won't bother you any more with this chatter. I just wanted to inform you that I haven't forgotten my obligation to you for an instant, and that I'm doing everything I can to bring my project to fruition.
Regards to Mrs Guggenheim."
--- The beginning and ending of a lengthy letter included in Prologue: Diary of the Grant


Mario Levrero, 1940 - 2004