Loop by Brenda Lozano, translated by Annie McDermott (Charco Press) is at once a retelling of The Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective and completely and entirely its own thing. The narrator, the Penelope stand-in, has a boyfriend who has traveled from their home in Mexico City to Spain after his mother’s death. She is waiting on his return, which gets delayed, making her wonder whether he will return at all.
But what could a retelling of The Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective mean, really? A huge range of things! In this case, the narrator spends her time writing in a notebook rather than weaving by day and unravelling her work at night. She records thoughts throughout the day in separate paragraphs, each paragraph shifting to a new topic, but each topic looping back eventually — hence the title — so her ideas and thoughts develop over time and return again and again, even as her life is mostly in a holding pattern. Some things happen to the narrator — she does a little traveling, she meets with friends, she argues with her boyfriend on the phone — but mostly this book is plotless aside from the question of whether her boyfriend will return, and when.
It’s also utterly charming and fun, philosophical and strange. The pleasure of reading this book comes from following the narrator’s quirky mind. She’s slightly at odds with everything around her. She notices what others don’t notice and values what others disregard. She thinks a lot about scale, the relative size and weight of things, how they fit together or don’t, and how our sense of scale and meaning can change when our perspective changes. The book starts with the line, “Today a dwarf smiled at me,” and thereafter the narrator keeps returning to the idea of smallness. This means returning to thoughts of how a dwarf might see and experience the world and also to how people make judgments about the value of the small:
Dwarf things. Small things. Little things in relation to the norm. Insignificant things. Things with different dimensions. Curiously, the stories I like the most are made up of trivialities. Details. Trifles. These days, people look to what’s big. The big picture, big sales figures, success. Bright lights, interviews, breaking news. Whatever’s famous. Importance judged by fame. Maybe small things are subversive. Living on a modest scale compared to the norm. Maybe the dwarf is the hero of our time.
This is, obviously, a statement of the novel’s aesthetics, since these “insignificant things” are exactly what Loop offers: small observations on the small things of life. The significance of those insignificant things — the subversiveness of this book — is implied; it is the message of the book taken as a whole. A sense of significance is what comes from experiencing how the book’s little pieces add up over time.
Those “little pieces” include a lot of literary talk; the narrator thinks about Homer (she draws the Penelope parallel herself), Ovid, Proust, Kafka, Lispector, Borges, and many others. The pieces also include many thoughts on writing, especially notebook writing, that “small,” “insignificant” genre she works in. The narrator loves a particular brand called the “Ideal” notebook, which she is continually searching for and can only rarely find.
Her notebook is many things, including a physical object that is useful for many non-literary tasks such as turning off light switches. It becomes the margins of the books she reads when she takes notes on them. It’s a reflection of her mind, and a symbol of a journey: she is an armchair traveler, journeying through language and in writing, searching for Ideal notebooks and playing with “ideal” as a concept. The notebook is a place where the heady world of language meets concrete, physical reality and a symbol of the way language and reality are inextricable. It also works great as a coaster:
If I close the notebook and rest my mug of hot coffee on it, it will be doing one of its many jobs. The notebook is a bit like a freelancer. So I’ll stop writing. Ideally the notebook could show off all its functions at once.
The narrator may be on a quest — in this she is Odysseus as much as she is Penelope — but it’s a quest for that particular notebook brand. Any loftier motive for questing this narrator would not trust.
The narrator wants change (in this she is Odysseus as much as she is Penelope, once again). The words, “Change. Unlearning yourself is more important than knowing yourself” appear in her notebook on a loop. Perhaps this is her version of Penelope’s undoing her weaving every night. She doesn’t want to be just one thing; she wants to experiment with scale, to see the world as a dwarf might. She has been forced to change by circumstances: we learn early on that she is recovering from a close brush with death, although we never learn what the accident was. Perhaps this embrace of change is method of coping with this accident, perhaps not. Regardless, she turns to Ovid to help understand what change means:
Daphne, for example, turned into a tree. Her metamorphosis wasn’t a punishment. She wanted it so much and so deeply that in the end it happened. Her words granted her the transformation. Metamorphosis is the continuation of a character’s story: it can be a punishment or a gift. I wonder if the written word has the same power, if words can change us like that. If writing and reading transform us into something we have yet to discover.
This narrator wants to unravel herself, to unravel language, even to unravel the political circumstances she lives in: she frequently references the violence and misogyny of the world around her. What matters is revision, flexibility, smallness, insignificance.
The ideal metaphor for all this: the notebook. It’s the space of exploration, a place to make attempts and try again. It’s a marginal space, small, slight. It’s a space to build and collapse a self. It’s a place to wait: for the big event of Odysseus returning but also for the small, everyday event of walking to the store, seeing a dwarf, and seeing how his smile might change you.
Publishing This Week
New (mostly) small-press books out recently that I haven’t yet read and am adding to my TBR. All quotations below are from the publisher:
Dark Tourist: Essays by Hasanthika Sirisena (Mad Creek Books): “Dark tourism--visiting sites of war, violence, and other traumas experienced by others--takes different forms in Hasanthika Sirisena's stunning excavation of the unexpected places (and ways) in which personal identity and the riptides of history meet.”
A Different Distance: A Renga by Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr (Milkweed Editions): “In March 2020, France declared a full lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Shortly thereafter, poets and friends Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Naïr--living mere miles from each other but separated by circumstance, and spurred by this extraordinary time--began a correspondence in verse.”
Silent Refusal: Essays on Contemporary Feminist Writing by Kristina Marie Darling (Black Ocean): “What motivates writers to create purposefully difficult texts? In what ways is textual difficulty politically charged? In this collection of smart and accessible essays, Kristina Marie Darling seeks to answer these questions by delving deeply into the idea of difficulty in contemporary women's poetry.”
The Intimate Resistance by Josep Maria Esquirol, translated by Douglas Settle (Fum d'Estampa Press): “A keen and deeply beautiful reflection on the human condition and our relationships with ourselves and others, The Intimate Resistance is an intelligent and thoughtful essay on how we as individuals can warm, protect and guide those around us.”
An Impossible Love by Christine Angot, translated by Armine Kotin Mortimer (Archipelago): “Reaching back into a world before she was born, Christine Angot describes the inevitable encounter of two young people at a dance in the early 1950s: Rachel and Pierre, her mother and father.”
New on the TBR
New books acquired:
Grievers by Adrienne Maree Brown (AK Press, 2021): A plague novel! “Dune's mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks--in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life--casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers.”
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Grove, 2020): This is the follow-up to Convenience Store Woman. It’s a novel about “a woman who believes she is an alien.” I’ve heard it’s very dark.
Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life With the Internet by Maël Renouard, translated by Peter Behrman de Sinéty (NYRB, 2021): “Here this young philosopher, novelist, and translator tries out a series of conjectures on how human experience, especially the sense of self, is being changed by our continual engagement with a memory that is impersonal and effectively boundless.”
Self-Portrait by Celia Paul (NYRB, 2020): A memoir about “the author's relationship with a flawed but influential figure--the painter Lucian Freud--and the satisfactions and struggles of a life lived through art.”
Current/Recent Reading
A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard (Hill and Wang, 2010, originally published in 1977): I’m reading this as part of a Twitter group read — #LoversDiscourse21 — and it’s wonderful to be reading Barthes again, this time with company.
Real Estate by Deborah Levy (Bloomsbury, 2021): I’ve now finished this autobiographical trilogy, and I love it so much! Levy is so brilliant on being a woman and a woman writer.
The Cormac Report
As I wrote about last time, we had plans to see The Nutcracker, and see it we did. As with all his theater experiences so far, Cormac loved it. This time, he did get a little antsy in the second half; his comment afterward was that there was a lot of dancing. He liked it! But the story is fairly minimal and he’s not familiar with ballet, so he had less to hang on to and make sense of. The spectacle was amazing. He’s a kid who loves language and story, though, so ballet doesn’t speak to him in the same way plays and musicals do. Which I totally understand. It’s just so great to be able to see shows, and I hope the latest Covid wave doesn’t end our very good theater streak.
Have a good week everyone!