The Luminous Novel

By Mario Levrero | Trans. by Annie McDermott

And Other Stories | Aug. 3, 2021 | $19.95

Here is a warning about The Luminous Novel from the narrator himself: “Nothing spectacular has happened, and I hope nothing does.” 

            Mario Levrero is not writing to entertain. When he won a Guggenheim, his “friend encouraged me to write a story I knew would be impossible to write, and he imposed it on me as a duty.” Levrero bears his duty, returning to the story he abandoned sixteen years before. But as he admits in the introduction, “the task was and is impossible. There are some things that can’t be written about. This whole book is the testimony of a monumental failure.”

            Nothing happens; the book fails. Most of The Luminous Novel consists of a four-hundred-page diary in which Levrero waits for illumination, struggles to write, burns through his grant, and endures the insignificance of daily life from August 2000 to August 2001. Why read it? What do we find in these diaried months?

            Loafing; Montevideo through the author’s eyes. “A record of minor personal triumphs.” Levrero psychoanalyzes himself, reads detective novels, takes medications, makes yogurt, downloads pornography and produces montages of it, transcribes strange dreams, suffers a toothache, orders an air conditioning unit, pirates computer programs, complains about back pain, and plays virtual card games. On page 136, an early climax: “I’ve finally shaved.” And later: “I fixed Word 2000!!!!!!”

            Levrero mostly wastes time on his computer, a “way of shrinking time so it passes without my feeling any pain. But that’s also how my life is slipping away from me.” This is a novel about writing a novel that the author knows will fail, but now it is clear that Levrero wrote a horror about what the computer can inflict on us: banality, laziness, futility and ennui. “I’m possessed by a system,” he writes, “I feel alien to myself.” Early on he counts two and a half hours of screen time per day, which terrifies him (and look at us—we four-hour, we seven-hour, we thirteen-hour scrollers!). His average rises to seven hours per day, then ten. Soon, he writes, “the world of the computer is even appearing in my dreams,” leaving him “with no imagination.” The feeling corrodes his life, boredom “mixed with something stronger, something that hits me every so often like a gust of wind and brings with it a kind of panic or extreme desolation; as if everything were going to lose all meaning from one moment to the next.” So Annie McDermott’s vivid translation, sixteen years after the original publication, comes at the right time: we have internalized Levrero’s techno-panic, and each year we slip further from our memories of a pre-digital time. We’re all digital natives now and live like Levrero: bored, incomplete, dulled by our devices, gorged on images, yearning for illumination but anxious, powerless, and distressed.

            While it foretells digital life, Levrero’s “Diary of the Grant” also exemplifies contemporary fiction. This is anti-literature, the book about nothing, the diary-novel or essay-novel made to represent reality through minimal artifice and the mundane. Levrero’s pages on the mundane won’t addict you, like in Knausgaard, or lead you to moments teeming with beauty, as in Proust. Instead, they keep you waiting, as Alejandro Zambra says in a speech, for “writing is waiting for an illumination that is delayed and never arrives.” 

            The book’s final one hundred pages, titled “The Luminous Novel,” continue the diary’s digressive style but reach for the sublime. They start with the narrator’s epiphany of an “anonymous dog, sniffing a tuft of grass with real relish one warm afternoon. … I thought: if smell is for dogs what sight is for people, this dog is seeing the female herself and not just her trail.” This marks “the beginning of my spiritual awakening”: Levrero—or his narrator—falls in love, sees grapes turn to wine, takes communion, weeps in a church. And he communicates with the nonhuman, relating how, for example, “I encountered some enormous rocks … with which it was possible to hold a friendly conversation,” and how he “communicated telepathically with a dog,” and how, in the most incredible of scenes, “a traffic light once informed me that I—and it, of course—was alive.” The prose lifts in these sections; luminosity has been at least briefly grasped. But Levrero concludes: “I’m sorry, literature, … I’ve abandoned you too in this reverie of self-absorption ... I’m losing you, too, but it had to be done. I hope you understand.”

            This is the author’s project: to abandon literature for life. And as I read the advance proof, literature became life. I became Mario Levrero. Work exhausted me, and I stopped to skim other books that went down more smoothly, like how Levrero eases his reading of Rosa Chacel’s books “the way you might cut one drink with another.” My Word broke and would not update: I had to install and uninstall the application, then my entire Microsoft Office, to repair it. I vanished into meaningless news, experimented with diets, went on long walks that led nowhere. Once I sat down to finally write this review, to finish it once and for all, I got up to drive to Midway Airport and pick up the woman who owns my heart: it was late; I loaded myself with coffee; I missed exits, drove in circles, went on and off ramps; I stopped for gas; I parked, waved at a child, helped an elderly woman with her suitcase at the curb in front of the arrivals—and suddenly she emerged, the woman with my heart, it was midnight and the moon was out and her face shone in the crowd of strangers. We embraced and I lifted her suitcases into my car and drove us to her apartment in Lincoln Park. We ate McDonald’s on the couch and talked and talked and talked and we didn’t feel tired and we talked and talked and talked and life felt so full, I didn’t think about writing or books, didn’t worry about my review, didn’t plan scenes for my novel-in-progress, didn’t imagine a grand career as a Writer of Literature or minor career as an Adjunct Professor of Literature: none of that mattered because we were together again. All night I could not sleep—coffee and joy rioted in my veins—and I woke early to drive to Wisconsin for a teaching meeting and back. When I returned, reality returned. An exhaustion I had never felt freighted my life. I wandered in a haze, napped twice per day, daydreamed of sleep in meetings, and dropped onto my mattress every chance I could in a fatigue of dreams. After a few days I started to emerge from my tiredness. I drank smoothies to gain strength; I drove to the mall to buy a new pair of black leather boots (I had never owned a pair of black leather boots). And I returned to this Word Document to finish this review. The printed words had transformed me, directed me, and turned me into a living character from The Luminous Novel. 

            This novel is like a Beckettian absurd: I admire it conceptually, but when I experience it at times I want to bury my head under the lid of a trash can like the figures in Endgame. It’s a necessary turn in the genre—but do we want to read this “novel without a novel,” as Zambra writes, this “literature without literature?” Levrero concedes that “these things probably won’t be of the slightest interest to any eventual readers.” And he writes, “I imagine the eventual, hypothetical, long-suffering reader got lost a long time ago.” But his book succeeds because, as he explains, “only pointless things, only indifferent things, can give me the freedom I need in order to get back in touch with what I honestly believe is the essence of life.” The only way to literature is through not-literature. The only way to literature is through life—which, sometimes, is illuminating, beautiful, and transcendent, but more often is boring, tedious, forgettable, and meaningless.

            I have been thinking about this all year. In the reopening, my desire to read waned. Levrero documents daily life without narrative tricks, and I admire his efforts: they lead readers to the future of literature, which is a return to reality. But his diary lasts hundreds of pages, without revelation, and through the window of my loft I see crowds of young strangers stepping down from the platform at Morgan Station, heading for the bars in the West Loop of Chicago. The magician living one floor beneath me steps into my apartment with two giant bowls of ramen, uses my microwave, asks me about London, and performs a trick that moves the hands of Big Ben. Clouds trace their shadows on the crumbling faces of the buildings on my street. And the woman who has my heart texts me to come over already, it’s Friday, the sun is setting, there is still so much left to do.

——

Marek Makowski is a writer who lives in Chicago. His writing recently appeared in The Rumpus and The Yale Review. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and you can find more of his work on his website, marekwriting.com.