Parodies and puzzles

The Uruguayan writer, humorist and crossword-setter Mario Levrero (1940–2004) has long been a cult author in the Hispanic world. His dry and moody voice has recently begun to be heard in English, with the translation of three of his dozen novels and collections of short stories. The first two are from Levrero’s late style: Empty Words (2019; El discurso vacío, 2006) and Luminous Novel (2021; La novela luminosa, 2005), in which he writes about “writing” (improving one’s calligraphy, say, or diarizing writer’s block) as a distraction from, and finally sly substitute for, the literary object itself. Now comes The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, first published in 1970, then unjustly forgotten for decades – a more colourful string of fictions, redolent of Lewis Carroll and Julio Cortázar in their blend of the fantastical and the mundane.

Levrero, however, always refused the tag of fantasy: he sought, he said in 1985, to work out the suggestions of dreams, or simply of nagging images, in the idiom of conscious perception. It was a matter of spiritual self-discovery: “Until I read Kafka, I didn’t know that you could tell the truth”. And the truth is unsettling. Two versions of the title story bookend the volume. In the first a conscientious check of the house before bed (carried out by an early example of Levrero’s classic fusspot narrator) is made only mildly strange by the presence of the “Thinking-About-Gladys Machine … purring away softly as usual”, along with a last-minute fear of the house collapsing; in the second the enumeration of cartoon horrors, such as a rotting horse in the bathtub, replaces the cosy confirmations of order. More disturbing is an absence: there is no mention of the mysterious machine.

But such horror is rare. Instead, everyday life, with its petty complaints (“Carrying cash is such a nuisance”) merges with weirdness in a casual, ho-hum tone, like when you tell a friend about an odd thing that happened. In “The Stiff Corpse” the narrator is merely intrigued by the body that has just fallen out of the wardrobe: “I thought it might be some long-forgotten dead relative (I don’t open the wardrobe very often)”. As situations grow increasingly dreamlike, pursuit rather than escape is the dominant figure. Narrators are impelled to seek an unforgettable woman or the origin of a peculiar sound; they set out to know things, like what is wrong with their cigarette lighter or what is inside a locked basement. (Levrero loved detective stories and several novels have sleuths at their heart.)

In these parodies of epic quests, all kinds of obstacles and deflections beset the hero, from flocks of mutants, gelatinous oracles and horny fat ladies to the mistake of oversleeping. Space is apt to swell or ramify or rearrange itself. One notable story, “The Boarding House”, combines the shaggy-dog indeterminacy of the longer pieces with the roundedness of the shorter ones, while reproducing in its structure the phenomenon of multiplying spaces. It is a single eleven-page sentence – based on a proposition that the reader can just about track between monstrously ballooning parentheses – that explains why the speaker really ought to leave a “very badly run” boarding house plagued by impossible architecture, abnormal activities, outlandish tenants and other annoyances, to conclude, with hallmark understatement, “because, quite honestly, I can’t take it here much longer”. While the translator Annie McDermott’s control of this teetering edifice deserves particular applause, her and her co-translator Kit Schluter’s work is perfectly pitched throughout.

Sometimes the keynote is charming absurdity. In “That Green Liquid” the point is not that a whole circus, including elephants, crowds into the narrator’s room when he opens the door to a pushy saleswoman; it is that the two intrusions are unconnected. But this too illustrates the way in which Mario Levrero’s oeuvre as a whole circles around the thwarting of purpose and the elusiveness of ultimate meaning. Over time he refined to the extreme his deferral and displacement of ends. This enjoyable volume gives us the writer still wryly observing the disguises of his unconscious.

Lorna Scott Fox is a journalist, editor and translator

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