From "the most talented writer of his generation" (The New York Times Magazine), 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 the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and an exploration of fathers and sons, male friendship and rivalry, and the challenges of parenting in a burning world. One of the first great novels about the early days of COVID, it is also a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Full of startling insight, but written with the intensity of a séance, Lerner shows us how the air is full of messages, full of ghosts. Ultimately Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.
"[Lerner's] strangest and most moving book yet . . . Lerner has found a way to make phonelessness vivid, almost fleshy in its legibility . . . A novel that attempts to reimagine the most alienating of our shared afflictions-the human body in disarray, the relatively new societal anxiety of phone addiction-into a more humane aesthetic experience."
-Kevin Lozano, New York Magazine
"Above all, [Lerner] makes a case that reading-our experience of decoding, observing patterns, interpreting and misinterpreting language-is not merely a means of accessing a version of reality but an event in itself, and a profound encounter . . . There is a sense of the novel reveling in its own power of listening, its own antennae. . . . The novel is our great, communal dream, the place that reveals what composite creatures we really are, what tangles of invention, what repositories for one another's needs and fears. ('I sound angry, but I think it is yours, the anger, reflected in me,' a character says to another.) Can your phone do all that?"
-Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Magazine
"The texture of the writing . . . blends the narrator's version of events with his dreams and even, at one point, suggests that he is aware he is in a novel. Even more vitally, Mr. Lerner is very funny. When attached to a character, indeterminacy manifests itself as confusion, and the novel mines a lot of humor from the bumbling of its poet-antihero. The narrator's mishandling of his cellphone reprises the author's delightful affinity for physical slapstick . . . [The] morals of Transcription have to do with its insistence on mystery, and on art that teases the mind and refreshes the senses. It may be a novel, but Mr. Lerner, after all, is a poet."
-Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
"I love to get into the cushioned golf cart of Lerner's consciousness and accompany him on one of his careful rides, where he takes care of both of us and sharpens my consciousness . . . The grain of his brain stories is so fine and, to this brain, those stories are as universal as any others."
-Sasha Frere-Jones, 4Columns
"A novel about touch, devices and familial inheritances that is itself intricate, uncanny, sometimes breathtakingly realistic . . . Transcription reveals itself as more, far more, than an anthropology of digital modernity . . . And it's precisely in these moments of storytelling and connection that we might, just might, escape the noose of nowness, become touched by an enriched sensation of time."
-Sukhdev Sandhu, The Guardian
"This may be the best novel you'll read all year . . . Brilliant and incisive . . . A novel as intelligent and elegant as any you might read . . . You learn more from Lerner's prose about the ways in which we reach for each other, and miss each other, and try and try again-which is a lifelong project, and maybe, from that angle, a sad one-than you will from reading most other books. Lerner's style is distinctive and wonderful."
-Cal Revely-Calder, The Telegraph
"A stunning meditation on parenthood, technology, and memory as pleasurable as reading Lerner has ever been."
-Jasmine Vojdani, Vulture
"[An] exquisite, shape-shifting novel."
-Giles Harvey, The New Yorker
"Intricate and unsettling, Transcription is a book of echoes and parallels; the connections it draws between individuals, and between life and art, are a signature of Lerner's refined, allusive fiction. It's also a compelling exploration of how this hyper-literate sensibility, its intense interest in overlap and resonance, can lead us astray."
-Hannah Rosefield, The New Republic
"Smartphones have become so integral to our lives, really external hard drives to brains and souls, that how modern authors incorporate them into regular old paper books has become a kind of steeplechase. Right now Lerner, with his combination of erudition and lightness, and decathlete's command of different, overlapping genres, is winning."
-Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times
"Remarkable . . . Lerner's voice is one that interrupts itself, repeats history, and reorders the world."
-Hannah Gold, Harper's Magazine
"In our world of deepfakes, 'fresh air' scents, and robo-voices emanating from pockets, there's hope that understanding fiction-what we consider artifice, as well as its limits-might help lead us, collectively, back to our senses."
-Liza St. James, BOMB (Editor's Choice)
"Lerner has been hailed by The New York Times as 'the best writer of his generation,' and his fourth novel lives up to the hyperbole . . . Thomas once told the narrator: 'We hear as if. We are together, erring.' To riff on Rilke ('For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror'), Lerner's tale suggests that beauty might be only the beginning of error."
-Michael Autrey, Booklist (starred review)
"Ben Lerner's novels contain some of the best art criticism I've encountered. His analysis is embodied but self-conscious, erudite but sincere. That's why I'm looking forward to Transcription, about a non-interview with a 'giant in the arts.' I wouldn't trust many writers to make a 'plot' like that worth my time, but I trust him."
-Lisa Yin Zhang, Hyperallergic
"It's every journalist's worst nightmare, and yet, Lerner's book still comes as a delightful exploration of mentorship, fatherhood, and a career in the arts, as well as a testament to our growing reliance on technology as a store of cultural memory."
-CULTURED (Best Anticipated)
"Beautiful and resonant . . . Lerner's lyrical narrative brims with insights into how memories take and change shape, the nature of father figures, and the ways an artist's influence echoes through time. It's a knockout."
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Transcription is another masterful intervention from a writer of unparalleled exactitude and intelligence. Lerner's linguistic precision, stylistic brilliance and philosophical range are not only thrilling things to encounter on the page, they are gentle surgical tools for a tender existential operation upon the reader. They crack open a profound reckoning with how we are living now, and the effect is genuinely startling. We call this fiction, but it is much, much more."
-Max Porter, author of Shy
"Transcription is both dizzyingly accomplished and disarmingly tender-an acutely elegant and forensic meditation on the disorientation of what it means to be alive now."
-Sophie Mackintosh, author of Cursed Bread
"Some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered . . . [Transcription is] surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along."
-Kirkus Reviews (starred)
Es wurden noch keine Bewertungen abgegeben. Schreiben Sie die erste Bewertung zu "Transcription" und helfen Sie damit anderen bei der Kaufentscheidung.
