The luminous novel

The puzzling second work in English from the late Uruguayan author Levrero (1940--2004, after Empty Words) follows a 60-year-old writer named Mario who's just received a Guggenheim grant. Mario begins keeping a diary until he feels ready to return to what he describes as a "luminous novel," which he started 16 years earlier, but never finished. Mario can't sleep; he plays computer games and downloads pornography; tries to quit smoking and using the computer so much; records and analyzes his dreams; reads detective novels; laments the heat; and more than anything, bemoans that his relationship with "beautiful and seductive" Chl is no longer sexual, even though she still brings him food and occasionally spends the night. What Mario does not do, until nearly a year later, is write the novel, which mainly recounts the women he slept with. Indeed, Mario believes that "these days a novel is practically anything you can put between a front and back cover." It's a credible documentation of writer's block and narcissism, but readers will be left wondering what purpose it serves. This is literature in the same way that John Cage's 4'33" is music. (Aug.)

A masterwork of meta-referentiality by the late Uruguayan writer Levrero (1940-2004). Our narrator, Levrero himself, is a grumbler of Dostoyevskian proportions, to say nothing of a supremely accomplished procrastinator. He longs for the woman he calls Chl, both confidante and caretaker and a perfectionist: "Chl makes wonderful stews, but she says this one didn't turn out very well; apparently the peas are a bit hard," he grimly observes. Levrero's big problem, consuming him throughout the book, is that he's won a Guggenheim fellowship to write a novel that is overly ambitious to the point of being impossible. "It being impossible wasn't reason enough not to do it, as I knew full well, but the prospect of attempting the impossible made me feel very lazy," he allows. His solution is to invent projects for himself, writing little computer routines to address the manifold shortcomings of Windows 95 (the book was written way back in the day) and of Word 2000, against which he fights quixotic battles. When he's not doing that, he thinks of other ways to procrastinate: fantasize about Chl, to be sure, but also call in an electrician to rewire his flat so that he can move his computer around, the better to play Minesweeper, FreeCell, and Golf at all hours of the day and night. Depressed and ill, our narrator finally concludes that the luminous novel of his dreams is really an autobiography, and life is getting in the way of his writing it. Levrero, a photographer, experimental writer, and humorist, clearly revels in the prospect of writing an unclassifiable novel, as this surely is, but even more clearly he delights in not meeting his obligation to Guggenheim, which, he figures, will accept his explanation that his novel has expanded beyond its original bounds. "Besides, they don't care," he rationalizes, "they just need me to take responsibility for the grant I received, to show the donors that they haven't thrown their money away." Fans of Perec, Coover, and other experimentalists will enjoy Levrero's epic struggle not to write this book. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.