LOOP

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.