THE THINKING-ABOUT-GLADYS MACHINE

Eleven short stories from the weirder end of South American culture.

Best known for his posthumously published work The Luminous Novel (2021), this collection by Levrero (1940-2004) resurrects his earliest fiction, most with shades of paranoia and self-consciousness that would turn Philip K. Dick green. The opener already gives off a strong “Tell-Tale Heart” vibe, as one man’s checklist of his nightly bedtime rituals descends into disaster—and that’s the cheerier of the two stories that bookend the collection (“The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine” and “The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine (Negative)”), both concerning a machine that seems to offer a self-destructive feedback loop instead of white noise. Even a casual action like igniting a lighter becomes a labyrinthine quest for salvation in “Beggar Street,” while brevities like “One-Way Story No. 2” use a mere handful of words to examine existential truths. There is some humor here, albeit very dark. “The Stiff Corpse” offers Pythonesque absurdity, while seemingly innocuous items become instruments of destruction in “Jelly” (a take on The Blob by way of Latin American surrealism) and in “That Green Liquid,” which shows a home product demonstration going Cat in the Hat–grade awry. The only notion that’s overused is the haunted house motif that marks “The Abandoned House,” full of tiny men and spiders and unicorns and whatnot, and the locked-room-mystery that morphs into a hero’s quest in “The Basement.” Similarly, insomnia and obsession grip the protagonists of “The Golden Reflections” and “The Boarding House,” where nocturnal wanderings lead men astray. Most of the collection’s protagonists are unnamed gray men whose featurelessness sharpens the bizarre elements of each tale. They often seem adrift, navigating a slow descent into mediocrity that makes their encounters with the surreal, and the dichotomy between their worldviews and Levrero’s phantasmagorical imagination, delightfully jarring.

A delightful artifact that will leave readers wondering if they ever truly understood the world at all.