This riddling novel is the English-language debut of the Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero (1940-2004). His translator, Annie McDermott, tells us in an introduction that he was an uncategorisable cult figure formed of omnivorous influences, from comic strips to tango music. “It’s a mistake to expect literature to come only from literary sources,” he told a rare interviewer, “like expecting a cheesemaker to eat nothing but cheese.”
Seemingly autobiographical, Empty Words (1996) is set between 1989 and 1991, taking the form of the diary of a depressed and overweight fiction writer with eczema. His mother has just had a stroke and his wife wants an expensive new house, which he’s hoping to fund with a pay rise from his job, setting crossword puzzles.
When a friend says handwriting exercises might help him feel better, he ditches his typewriter for a pen and sets about making his crabbed script more uniform and free-flowing, without pausing to worry what his words mean. “I know these daily exercises will do wonders for my health and character... catapulting me blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, and success with women and in other games of chance.”
There’s a dry humour here. In his entry for 6 October 1990, he pats himself on the back for keeping up his regime; yet the previous entry is dated 4 October. “I think the antidepressants are starting to do something,” he says later. “I’m definitely noticing the side effects, anyway.” His plea for a pay rise gets him fired, by alerting his bosses that they’ve been overpaying him.
In 1990, Uruguay had only recently surfaced from more than a decade of military rule, a period in which torture, political imprisonment and disappearances were commonplace. It’s probably no coincidence that, while Levrero’s narrator craves meaning-free prose, concentrating only on each letter’s strokes and loops, he still finds himself haunted by the years between 1985 and 1989, when he suddenly left the country for Argentina, for reasons kept hazy. “A vague narrative relating to a war and various soldiers or policemen I had to hide from” features among his recurring dreams, some comically erotic, others plain surreal.
At the same time, his travails could belong to any writer, scorning interruption while secretly craving it; his teenage son, (“he’s seen his name written down and wants to know what this is all about... so I write: Juan Ignacio is a fool”), his pet dog and the noisy electricity substation next door are among various things enabling his inactivity. Despairing of “an environment where everything colludes to make you aim low”, he resents being “bound by the omnipotent will of a woman who is in turn completely bound by social conventions”: his wife just wants to celebrate Christmas.
McDermott tells us that, in his first novel, The City, Levrero set out “almost ... to translate Kafka into Uruguayan”. I half-wondered if Empty Words was his shot at Thomas Bernhard; in particular, the Austrian’s 1982 novel Concrete, about another sickly procrastinator blaming all and sundry for his inability to finish a book, although Levrero – at least on this evidence – feels the sunnier writer, relishing the mundane comedy of household dynamics as much as more cosmic jokes of existence. Just as you’re wondering where it’s all going, a last-minute revelation concerning the narrator’s mother confirms a lingering suspicion that the real action in this teasing jeu d’esprit lies between the lines, not on them, as the writing itself begins to look like a form of displacement activity.
As a calling card for Levrero’s talent, it’s certainly enticing. Next up, we’re told, is The Luminous Novel, which contains “a 450-page prologue explaining why it was impossible to write the book itself”. Can’t wait.
• Empty Words by Mario Levrero is published by And Other Stories (£8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
