Mario Levrero: La novela luminosa

[Bubba]

All right, I'm wondering if anybody here has read anything by the Uruguayan Mario Levrero. I managed to read a few pages of El alma de Gardel on Google books and it struck me as excellent. Still, it doesn't seem to be in print, and it's certainly not in a library anywhere near me. Doubt it's ever been translated, either.

Some of Levrero's other books are available, but I hesitate to order them. Just about every time I buy a book by a writer I've never read, I end up disliking the book. So would somebody who has trouble getting into books by the Uruguayan J. C. Onetti and doesn't much like Fuentes, Bola?o, Garc?a M?rquez, or Vargas Llosa enjoy Levrero's La novela luminosa, Dejen todo en mis manos, or El discurso vac?o?

[Bubba]

I finally ordered and read La novela luminosa ("The Bright Novel") and am posting here to deliver my verdict.

First, four-fifths of the "novel" is made up of a section called "Diario de la beca" ("The Fellowship Diary"), the diary of a year or so Levrero spent on a Guggenheim fellowship. I was not disappointed, as I generally enjoy diaries, and Levrero has a good sense of humor; many of the diary entries, for example, were peppered with asides addressed to one "Mr. Guggenheim" and thanking him for his generosity and assuring him his money wasn't being wasted. The rest of the book is "The Bright Novel" properly speaking; it is more memoir--and a good one--than novel.

I don't share all of Levrero's interests--the pigeons he observes from his apartment, parapsychology, psychoanalysis, interpretation of dreams--and less than halfway through the book I started skipping the entries in which Levrero describes his dreams; I skipped them even though Levrero's interpretations of his dreams were sometimes interesting; it's just that I'm constitutionally incapable of reading (or listening to) descriptions of dreams.

All the same, Levrero is an intelligent man, and he's excellent company; his account of his friendship, which develops over a chessboard, with a priest by the name of C?ndido, is both entertaining and deeply moving. Equally entertaining and moving is his story of his relationship with a prostitute he identifies with nothing but an initial. La novela luminosa, in short, is characterized by a great freedom of form and content. It will be never be published in English, which is a shame, as I don't know of any English-language writers do anything remotely like Levrero has done.

The excerpt below will perhaps suggest why I regretted parting ways with Levrero:

I. said goodbye at the door to my building and got into her car. When I went in, the elevator was on its way down. A white-haired woman in a black jacket came out of it. Because of the poverty of her dress and the meekness of her look, I thought she was a maid, and maybe she was. She surprised me when, as she greeted me, she said: "Are you the professor?" I told that's what people called me, but they were wrong. She then asked me if I led writing workshops, and when I said I did she told me that people had told her she should come to my workshops. She said she wrote, and she said it very bashfully, like someone confessing a sin. She also said she was sorry she couldn't attend my workshops because she had to work. She knew very well who I was, and she seemed to have read some of my books. As we were taking leave of each other, she called me "professor" again. I told her not to give me that title, because I was just a writer who tried to pass some of his experience on to a few students. She shook her head, saying as she walked off: "The greatest are always the humblest." I rejoiced, not because I think I'm great, but because of that woman's kindness. When a person is truly kind, he always finds a way to brighten other people's spirits.

[Guillaume Barkero]

Bubba. Unfortunately, my experience with Levrero in English is zero. I live in Costa Rica and Spanish in my mother language. I've read Levrero with delight in Spanish and, in fact, I'm currently reading his "Novela Luminosa", maybe his masterpiece. Even though I highly recommend it, I'd go first with "Paris" or "El lugar" (The place), or with "La máquina de pensar en Gladys" ("The device to think about Gladys"), all of them excellent short stories or nouvelles. Levrero is not only inventive and obsessive, but his prose is kind of "tender", very readable, surprisingly simple... but the stories he wrote are dream-like accounts or "prose into the prose" pieces of realities, always full of obsession and, why not, wit. Levrero is somehow an "obscure master". Is he translated into English? I don't really know, but if he is, find him and enjoy your reading!

[Bubba]

No, Guillaume, there's nothing by Levrero in English. I also read Dejen todo en mis manos, which I didn't think was as good as La novela luminosa. But if all of El alma de Gardel is as good as the opening pages (and if I ever get my hands on a copy), I might translate it myself. I've been thinking about reading more Levrero, including the titles you mentioned, but where I am they have to be ordered...

I haven't found much in English about Levrero, either. But here at something called the Fric-Frac Club is a long piece in French on La novela luminosa. If you don't want to read it, you can at least look at the pictures.