Everyone was talking about this novel earlier in the year (which I always find a bit off putting), but I needed a new audio book and I decided this was it.
Here’s the blurb …
From the “most talented writer of his generation” (The New York Times), a lightning flash of a novel that is at once a gripping emotional drama and a brilliant examination of the devices, digital and literary, we use to store—or to erase—our memories.
The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend, Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail “from the future and the past simultaneously” and who “reenchants the air” when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.
What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Haunted by Kafka (there are echoes of “The Judgement” and “A Hunger Artist”), but utterly contemporary, Lerner combines trenchant insight with lyric mystery. Ultimately, Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.
I was quite confused listening to this. I don’t know if it was because I got distracted at an important moment and didn’t listen. I don’t know how we ended up listening to Max.
I did enjoy the narration from a single point of view, the narrator and then Max. I enjoyed Tomas’s ‘lectures’ and the detail of everything – eating disorderes, covid protocols, Switzerland (and who was on the trip). I think I might need to read or listen to it again.
A review.