Loop

by Brenda Lozano, Annie McDermott (Translator)

Overview

Winner PEN Translates Award (UK)

Recovering from an unspecified accident, the narrator of Loop finds herself in waiting rooms of different kinds: airport departure lounges, doctors’ surgeries, and above all at home, awaiting the return of her boyfriend, who has travelled to Spain following the death of his mother. Loop is a love story told from the perspective of a contemporary Penelope who, instead of weaving and unravelling her shroud, writes and erases her thoughts in her ‘ideal’ notebook. At once, funny and thought-provoking, her thoughts range from her stationery preferences to the different scales on which life is lived, while a cast of unlikely characters cross the page, from Proust to a mysterious dwarf, from a dreamy cat to David Bowie singing ‘Wild is the Wind’. Written in an assured, irreverent style, Loop is the journal of an absence, one in which the most minute or whimsical observations open up universes. Combining aphoristic fragments with introspective narrative, and evoking Italo Calvino and Fernando Pessoa in its playfulness and wry humour, this original reflection on relationships, solitude and the purpose of writing offers a glimpse of contemporary life in Mexico City, while asking what it really means to find our place in the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781916465640
Publisher:	Charco Press
Publication date:	06/15/2021
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	1,119,103
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Born in Mexico City in 1981, Brenda Lozano is a fiction writer, essayist and editor. She studied literature in Mexico and the United States. She edits the Chicago-based literary journal Make and is on the editorial board of Ugly Duckling Presse. In addition to Loop, she has published Todo o nada (All or Nothing, 2009), which is being adapted for the screen, and a book of short stories, Cómo piensan las piedras (How Stones Think, 2017). In 2015, she was recognised by the Hay Festival and the British Council as one of the leading Mexican authors under 40 years of age, and she was selected by the Hay Festival in 2017 as one of the Bogotá39, a list of the most outstanding new authors from Latin America. Loop is her first book to appear in English.

Annie McDermott is the translator of a dozen books from Spanish and Portuguese, by such writers as Mario Levrero, Ariana Harwicz, Brenda Lozano, Fernanda Trías and Lídia Jorge. She was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán for her translation of Wars of the Interior by Joseph Zárate, and her translation of Brickmakers by Selva Almada was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. She has previously lived in Mexico City and São Paulo, Brazil, and is now based in Hastings, in the UK.

Read an Excerpt

Today a dwarf smiled at me.As a girl I thought the electric pencil sharpener was what separated me from adult life. Between the blue plastic pencil sharpener and the electric pencil sharpener – in my father’s office or on the teacher’s desk – stretched the distance between childhood and adult life.At a dinner party when he was twenty-one, Proust was asked some questions. Among them, what his favourite bird was. The swallow, he replied. Proust didn’t invent the questions known as the ‘Proust questionnaire’, but his answers were so good they made the questionnaire famous. Proust responded to the questionnaire on two separate occasions. He was fifteen when he was asked his favourite colour.‘The beauty is not in the colours, but in their harmony,’ he said.At fifteen I still thought the electric pencil sharpener separated me from adult life. If I’d been asked my favourite colour I would have said the colour of my blue pencil sharpener, but Proust’s favourite bird is also my favourite bird.If I could turn into any bird, I’d choose a swallow.Change. Unlearning yourself is more important than knowing yourself.Jonás and I did a crossword together this evening. We made a good team. It was a kind of crossword with lots of blank numbered squares.You had to work out which letter of the alphabet corresponded to each number, and then work out the title, the author and the text underneath. He outlined the three-letter words in red, and I outlined the four-letter words in blue. It was a passage from First Love, about the love between the character’s parents. It took the two of us more than an hour to solve it. Crosswords are a good demonstration of how we function as a couple, in this apartment. A model, on a dwarf scale. His maths PhD came in useful for solving the puzzle. My degree in communication helped me remember the author’s surname. From the surname, we were able to work out the rest of the text thanks to Jonás’ usual methodical approach to things. Significant that the word ‘mother’ appeared so many times. Jonás’ mother died a week before we met and this very day, Sunday, would have been her birthday. Every time Jonás read the word ‘mother’ out loud I felt a pang.Today I saw the dwarf again, the same one who smiled at me in the street a few days ago.This time he was sitting with his back to me, in a little diner. He was checking something on his phone; I think he was reading the news. His feet, the soles of his shoes, weren’t touching the floor, and his knees weren’t bent. Straight, the legs of the dwarf sitting on the plastic chair.Tonight we listened to different versions of ‘Wild is the Wind’ as we lay in bed. Out of David Bowie and Nina Simone, I’d go for Bowie and Jonás would go for Nina Simone.I’ve found my combination: a Scribe notebook for a diary and an Ideal notebook for fiction. This is my married couple. Gemini at last become one. Today is a happy day, a day when I came across some dusty, forgotten Scribe and Ideal notebooks in a stationer’s on Calle Alfonso Reyes.They were the last ones. Scribe and Ideal notebooks are very difficult to find, but Alfonso Reyes’ passion for fictions is reflected in his street. I feel like Alfonso Reyes should intersect with Borges. The two writers would spend the whole time joking around between their streets, but what paranormal phenomena would take place in the stationer’s then?‘The Song of the Notebook’.That’s the title of the poem AlexanderVvedensky wrote in a notebook with a grey cover between 1932 and 1933.The collection of poems is called The Grey Notebook, simply because of the colour of the cover.A concert of trees and bushes.The wind in the branches: the song of the notebook in its original version. Silence. Listen to that song.If Jonás turned into a bird I could ask him to let me fly by his side, like in ‘Wild is the Wind’.I’d like to have dinner with Jonás, but today he won’t be home.‘I’m having dinner with my dad,’ the message says. I called him.We argued on the phone about something stupid. He’s going to spend the night there. I wish I’d never said anything.The dwarf on the block.Today he was wearing a three- piece suit and carrying a tiny cane. In the evening we exchanged glances. I felt a lot like the dwarf, on another scale of life and needing to lean on a tiny cane.

Editorial Reviews

04/12/2021

Mexican writer Lozano’s PEN Translation Prize–winning novel, her English-language debut, pulls off a dizzying chronicle of a woman’s antics as she waits in Mexico City for her boyfriend to return from Spain. Jonás left following the death of his mother, and the unnamed narrator has been left to indulge in her obsessions, including her Scribe and Ideal notebooks, which she uses for diary entries and fiction writing, respectively; David Bowie’s “Wild is the Wind” (she prefers the original recording; Jonás likes the Nina Simone cover); and the process of recovering from an unspecified accident that took place before Jonás’s departure (her doctor recommended daily afternoon walks). As she turns these obsessions over in her head and repeats her routine, she begins to unravel (“Unlearning yourself is more important than knowing yourself”). She imagines one of her notebooks as the sea, and its lines as waves. Waiting for Jonás, meanwhile, becomes an existential, Beckettesque situation. Lozano’s playful prose and imagery propel the book forward, despite its loose shape and lack of plot. It adds up to a delightful meditation on waiting, love, and the inevitability of change. Agent: Laura Palomares, Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells. (June)

Publishers Weekly

English PEN (Award)

"A glorious tapestry of ideas." —The Guardian

"In this novel, the stream of consciousness is more like a whirlpool." —New York Times

"It should be read, period." —The Quietus

"A meditation on writing itself." —3:AM Magazine

"Absolutely marvelous from first to final sentence….an unmitigated delight." —Jeremy Garber, Powell's Bookshop

"A delightful meditation on waiting, love, and the inevitability of change." —Publishers Weekly

"Unforgettably marvelous from its very first sentence to its final one, Loop is a delighting, discursive, diary-like novel full of personality, humor, and profundity." —, Powell's Bookshop

"Lozano is a marvellous writer, bright, funny, subtly perverse, always moving." —Francisco Goldman, author of THE ART OF POLITICAL MURDER

"Lozano knows she is gifted, and has no shame in showing it." —Margarita García Robayo, author of FISH SOUP and HOLIDAY HEART

"An astonishingly successful notebook narrative that blends a solid plot with considered and funny musings on purpose and loneliness." —Books and Bao

"Experimental, witty and disruptive." —Splice

"Clever, innovative...an erudite observation of the everyday." —Translating Women

"A truly original reflection on love, relationships, solitude and the aesthetics and purpose of writing." —Elif the Reader

"Tremendous fun and an immensely rewarding read." —Jeremy Garber, Powell's Bookshop

"This is not a work that represents the irreducible violence of the place, solves loneliness, or is about death in every respect, but rather an attempt to live with these realities and still miss your boyfriend." —Air/Light Magazine

"Filled with many weird and wonderful curiosities." —Full Stop

"utterly charming and fun, philosophical and strange" —Loop

"Incredible...I loved every second of this book." —The Tartan

From the Publisher

★ 2021-03-31
Winner of a PEN Translates award and the first of Mexican author Lozano's works to appear in English, this novel assumes the shape of a diary kept by a young woman in Mexico City.

When her boyfriend, grieving his mother's death, leaves for Spain on a family trip, the unnamed narrator is left waiting for him to return. Before falling in love with Jonás, she suffered a serious accident in which she nearly died. Writing short entries in her diary, she details her quest to find the perfect notebook, muses on music she loves, and notes conversations with friends and books she's reading, the apartment she and Jonás share, the news. The deceptively simple structure—intimate, charming, informal—allows for a great range of ideas and observations that loop and recur. If you are in danger of drowning, she learns, swim not forward but diagonally. "How do you swim diagonally in life?" she wonders, feeling as if the shore keeps getting farther away. A writer, she enthusiastically references everything from Greek mythology and the Bible to Proust, Machado de Assis, Disney, and Shakira. She is fascinated by ideas of scale, by the concept of the ideal, by the epidemic of violence in Mexico, the history of writing, art, gossip, waiting. She observes the cat, Telemachus; goes out with friends; travels to writing conferences; wonders if Penelope masturbated while waiting for Odysseus. She tells about “The Most Important Artist in Mexico” and invents "notebook proverbs": "The man in a suit walks to work, but the omniscient narrator describes him." She is skeptical of "useful things. Useful work, useful thoughts, useful phrases. Stories in which everything happens. A society that worships the verb. The famous concept of utility, the pursuit of usefulness." "I worship the margins," she tells us, "the secondary, the useless." Because "the more useless something is, the more subversive." With a light, playful touch, Lozano richly layers scenes and details, connecting ideas and weaving her story like Penelope at her loom.

An intimate book that starts small and expands steadily outward, with a cumulative effect both moving and hopeful.

Kirkus Reviews