The 3 best books by the dazzling Mario Levrero

Levrero is one of those writers who emerged in spontaneous generation, as if by accident, by pure chance. A man orchestra of the creative that as soon as he put on a novel or a story with an improvisation bordering on surrealism. The eternal enfant terrible of a Uruguayan literature where he appears as an antithesis and at the same time a complement to other great authors such as Onetti, Benedetti o Galeano.

But geniuses are like that. Even if domesticate, with the trade taken with a greater dose of improvisation than dedication and transferring between genres more considered as offshoots than as legitimate children of the most exalted literature, even with all this, Levrero is one of the greats.

Because ultimately, beyond the current arguments that could even flirt with science fiction, the rabid and untimely characterization of its characters end up endowing them with a life to the extreme, where only madness, lucidity, eccentricity and the crudest truths.

Top 3 recommended novels by Mario Levrero

The luminous novel

I guess you can never really know. But it seems that approaching the end, if it still keeps you lucid, can turn into too bitter a countdown. Hence, the body is turning off its lights and even the cells are darkening in their final necrosis. Consciousness does not stop succumbing in the same way.

Just before the decadence, Levrero wrote this wonderful book, face to face with the previous light, blinding before the blackout, enlightening from the nuclear target that leaves no shadow or doubt ...

The fear of death, love, loss of love, old age, poetry and the nature of fiction, luminous and unspeakable experiences: everything fits in this monumental work.

In his posthumous work, the exceptional Uruguayan novelist Mario Levrero gave himself up to the task of writing a novel in which he was able to narrate certain extraordinary experiences, which he called "luminous", without losing that quality.

An impossible task, as he confesses later, but in which he embarks with the "Diary of the scholarship." In each of the entries in this diary, which covers a year of his life, the author tells us about himself, his hobbies, his agoraphobia, his sleep disorders, his addiction to computers, his hypochondria and the meaning of your dreams.

His women deserve a separate chapter, especially Chl, who feeds him and accompanies him on his few walks around Montevideo in search of books by Rosa Chacel and the detective novels that he compulsively reads.

The luminous novel

The empty speech

Much has been written about writing, about writing, about the creator's bipolar loneliness accompanied by his characters like ghosts floating in another dimension close to the impulses that move the fingers that type the plot. (For me, the best book about it is «While i write", from Stephen King).

The question was always to get started. Let flow a small trace of life, a future, a possible plot that is actually already made from the moment the first letter is put. Something like this happens to the protagonist of this story, ready to give a good account of everything when he least expected it, immersed in the inertia of a calligraphic exercise to end up breaking down the wall that prevented him from writing for real ...

That writer starts a notebook with exercises to improve his penmanship in the belief that, as he improves it, his character will also improve. What pretends to be a mere physical exercise will be filled, involuntarily, with reflections and anecdotes about living, coexistence, writing, the meaning or non-meaning of existence.

The empty speech

Involuntary trilogy

Nothing involuntary in the possible link between Levrero's early works. Deep down, literature always has its master plan, its meaning, its adjustment to what has been lived. Levrero's first stories point to impossible scenarios where characters naturally move out of place, willing to rethink the new world in which they had to locate themselves by work and grace of a different pen than the usual ones.

The city, The place and Paris are the first three novels of Mario Levrero. Published between 1970 and 1982, they compose what he called "Involuntary Trilogy", since they share, without being due to an initial plan, a certain thematic and even topological unit.

The characters of The city, The place y Paris they populate scenes strewn with ballast and delay, in which the dream gives way to the threat and the fantastic appears among the ruins of the real. Gathered for the first time in a single volume, these news they occupy a central place in the work of this secret master.

Levrero's writing, articulated between humor and restlessness, is specified in a clean prose, grounded in the psychological, which portrays with astonishing vivacity the isolation and alienation of modern man. Mario Levrero, rara avis of Spanish American literature, he has been compared to Kafka and Onetti, and revered by successive generations of writers for more than thirty years.

Involuntary trilogy
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