Novel. El Péndulo, Argentina, 1984. Mondadori, Debolsillo, Spain, 2008; Editorial Carmel, Israel, 2010.160 pages.

Prologue by Julio Llamazares

The Place is the second novel of the Involuntary Trilogy (involuntary in the sense that the author only realized afterwards that he had written three novels in a row—The City, The Place and Paris—with the city as a common theme.

A man wakes up in an unfamiliar room. He is lying on the floor, in the dark, in street clothes. He is alarmed to realize that he has no idea how he got there. No matter how hard he tries, he cannot remember. His mind begins to weave a series of hypotheses but without finding one that conforms to the logic of the situation. So he decides to investigate. After examining the place in which he finds himself, he goes into another room like the first with two doors, one an entrance and one an exit, in which the passage of time is marked by lights going on and off.

“Humour, fantasy, a stifling Kafka-like mood…If we add a few drops of acid, traces of Freud and Richard Lester, the aroma of the best Chandler, the sadness of Gardel and the tango, the disquiet of the sleepless and the imperturbability of Onetti, we have ourselves an approximate picture of this book and its author….”

“An author who has surprised me more than anything has in a long time.” Julio Llamazares

Published in Spanish world-wide by Random House Mondadori; in Hebrew by Carmel

Novel.

El Cid, 1980;  Mondadori, Debolsillo, España, 2008; Editorial Carmel,  Israel, 2010. 155 pages.

Prologue by Constantino Bertolo

Along with The Place and The City, Paris makes up the Involuntary Trilogy (involuntary in the sense that the author only realized afterwards that he had written three novels in a row with the city as a common theme.

Paris is the story of someone who returns to a city where he has perhaps never been before. His return voyage has taken three hundred centuries and what he finds is the rusty shadow of a dead time: a taxi full of cobwebs with the corpse of the driver at the wheel, a thick layer of dust covering it all, a strange encounter with Marcel, the manager of a shop where he, it seems, had once worked.

A Paris shrouded in the elusive matter of dreams and a protagonist who senses that he has come back to this city in expectation of some event which he cannot point his finger on. In a leap into the void, to meet death, the character discovers that he has wings and can fly and so can be reborn and free himself from a lost time and an absurd, useless existence.

“Like Felisberto Hernández, Levrero is, above all, a writer about that which is ghostly, an alchemist who works with intimate spectres and the detritus of experience. Oliverio Coelho, Los Inrockuptibles

“A legendary writer, Mario Levrero has gone from warranting consideration as an author of incontrovertible importance to that of a writer of the stature of the great names in Latin American literature: Borges, Onetti, Piglia, Aira, Fogwill”. Constantino Bertolo

Published in Spanish world-wide by Random House Mondadori; in Hebrew by Carmel.

Novel. Tierra Nueva, Uruguay, 1970; Plaza & Janés 2000; Mondadori, Debolsillo, España, 2008;  Editorial Carmel , Israel, 2010.  200 pages

Prologue by Ignacio Echevarría

Along with The Place and Paris, The City comprises the Involuntary Triology (involuntary in the sense that the author only realized afterwards that he had written three novels in a row with the city as a common theme).

At the beginning of The City, the protagonist, having just arrived at the bleak dwelling in which he is planning to live, goes out to find a place nearby to buy kerosene. Then he goes for cigarettes, dry his clothes and other innocuous tasks that slowly take him further and further away from his home and into an alien city hazily defined.

“Life is astonishingly short. Now, in my memory, it is so compressed that I can hardly understand, for example, how a young person can decide to ride to the next village without being afraid that—apart from accidents—even the time allotted to a normal, happy life is far too short for such a journey.”

This quote from Kafka contains one of the keys to this novel, for the writing of which Levrero himself admits that he “tried to imitate [Kafka] with the greatest precision at my disposal”.

Published in Spanish world-wide by Mondadori; in Hebrew by Carmel

Alfaguara, 2004; Mondadori, 2008. 567 pages.

In this posthumously published work, Mario Levrero took up the task of writing a novel in which he could narrate certain extraordinary experiences that he called “luminous”. An impossible task, as he later admitted, but one on which he embarks in “Diary of the grant”. (Levrero wrote this novel after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship.)

In each of the entries in this diary which covers a year of his life, the author tells us about himself, his quirks, his agoraphobia, his sleep disorders, his computer addictions, his hypochondria and the meaning of his dreams. A separate chapter is dedicated to women, particularly Chl, who feeds him and takes him on the few walks he takes around Montevideo in search of books by Rosa Chacel and the detective novels he reads obsessively.

The fear of death, love, the loss of love, death, old age, poetry, and the nature of fiction, the luminous, inexpressible experiences: there is room for all of it in this monumental work.

“An incontrovertible figure in the new literature of Latin America”, El País, Babelia

“A masterpiece” Damián Tabarovsky  El País

“The unique style of an author who redefines the notion of the autobiography.” Fogwill

“One of the most important novels in Latin American literature in recent years”. Letras Libres

“From beginning to end, we are dealing with a challenging voyage through the lucid head of a great writer”. Letras Libres

“La novela luminosa” is a updated versión of Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities”. Revista  Universidad Diego Portales

“Cult book”, Fogwill

“….porous book which absorbs elements of the diary, the chronicle, the essay, auteur literary criticism…The book which establishes Levrero as one of the most profound, most mature writers in Hispano-American literature of recent decades.” Víctor Coral

Published world-wide in Spanish by Mondadori

Novel

Trilce, Montevideo, 199; Interzona, 2006; Mondadori,  Caballo de Troya, España, 2007; Debolsillo, España, 2008; Mondadori, Argentina, 2011.

“When one reaches a certain age, one is no longer the protagonist of one’s actions: everything is merely the consequence of previous actions. What one sowed has been growing surreptitiously and all of a sudden explodes into a sort of jungle that surrounds one on all sides, and the days can be opened up solely by dint of machete blows and then only to be choked out by the jungle again; and soon one discovers that any hope of escape is completely illusory, in that the jungle spreads faster that we can clear it and above all because the very notion of escape is erroneous; we cannot escape because we do not want to escape, and we do not want to escape because we have nowhere to go, because the jungle is one’s self, and escape would imply some sort of death or simply death. And even if there was once a time when one could die a certain kind of seemingly inoffensive death, now we know that those deaths were the seeds we sowed of the jungle we now are. (Fragment)

Considered his masterwork by many of his readers and some critics, Empty talk, is the story of a writer who spends his time observing his own calligraphy in search of answers about his identity. In the midst of a family crisis, fighting with his runaway wife, a dog with a yearning for freedom and a child who constantly interrupts his sacred concentration, the writer survives by grasping onto what he considers a maxim of calligraphy: “beautiful script, beautiful me”.

These sinuous lines give him answers about the meaning of writing, about the anxieties of creative writing and particularly about the always magical relationship of writing with life.

“An essential book, a cult work” Rodolfo Fogwill

“Each of his books is better than the one before” Damián Tabarovsky,  El País

Published in Spanish world-wide by: Random House  Mondadori