Cursive is supposed to happen at the right speed for steady thought. It hits the page slower than type and faster than print, and in this happy medium, one hopes the mind will hit its stride and think clearly, rationally, linearly. But what if the idea of cursive practice was to humble, even eradicate the content of the written word? That is the project of the narrator in Mario Levrero’s novel Empty Words—recently released in translation from the Spanish by Annie McDermott—to focus on neat, regular handwriting so careful that it smooths out all digressions of the mind. Though the narrator is, like the author, a writer and crossword setter, he takes a writer’s tool and divorces it from the act of connecting with the self or world. Instead, the physical act of writing becomes about avoiding spiritual searching, which has become too onerous—in an opening poem, before he begins his “graphological self-therapy” he writes “ It’s not worth searching, the more you look / the more distant is seems, the better it hides.”
So the narrator delves into his penmanship not in hope of being a better writer, but to “make changes on a psychological level,” ones that he claims, in a burst of optimism, “will do wonders for my health and charachter, transforming a whole plethora of bad behaviors into good ones and catapulting me blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, and success with women and in other games of chance.” When his exercises pick up pace, though, the neat, ordered discipline of handwriting breaks down and sloppy print letters creep into that uniform line of script. This indication that thought has begun to flow freely is not positive—it runs contrary to the two-dimensional bliss he imagines neatness can herald. He takes frequent breaks to play around with his computer, which, even though the book was originally published in 1996, is a daunting tool, “very similar to the unconscious.” Nonetheless, he claims to prefer it to his own exhausted mind: “there’s nowhere left to go when it comes to investigating my unconscious; the computer also involves much less risk, or risk of a different kind.”
Part of Horowitz’s charm is that he, like his readers, is in love with books. It’s probably part of what makes him so appealing to literary estates. Page by page he builds a solid case against the murderer, using all the conventional methods and the occasional well-worn trope of the genre. His suspects are a well-drawn, motley bunch. The chapters are filled with reams of dialogue. There’s a bumbling, but conscientious, police detective in the first book who is replaced by a pair of equally bumbling, but this time openly hostile, police detectives in the second. Expect a barrel of red herrings and lots of corpses. Fans of Midsomer Murders will know that there’s never just one death. In fact, it’s often the cover-up murder that provides the clue that cracks the case.
Within the confines of the form, Horowitz also demonstrates a deep knowledge of Literature with a capital L. A lot of thought has been put into these books, conceptually and structurally. Even their individual titles are plays on words which become significant as the stories unfold. There are references to Shakespeare in The Word Is Murder and Doyle in The Sentence Is Death. (The logical conclusion is that Dickens will somehow feature into the third installment … though wouldn’t it be nice if he went with Jane Austen instead?) Horowitz reaches deep into his writer’s bag of tricks, not only becoming a character in his own novel, but speaking directly to the reader about the secrets of his profession. Two paragraphs describing the logistics of writing and filming a chase scene serve as both prologue and apology “for what I must now describe.”
Even as a boy, I was already a book critic — of sorts. Any paperback I might buy underwent intense scrutiny for manufacturing flaws and other irritations. Bantam Books used dark, ugly paper little better than newsprint, the shiny cellophane on Mentor covers regularly delaminated, the design of Pocket Books struck me as bland and the glue binding for Dell titles occasionally dried out. None of them could match Signet or Penguin in terms of quality. Alas, I never saw any Oxford World’s Classics or Anchor Books until I went off to college.
There is no such thing as linguistic decline, so far as the expressive capacity of the spoken or written word is concerned. We need not fear a breakdown in communication. Our language will always be as flexible and sophisticated as it has been up to now. Those who warn about the deterioration of English haven’t learned about the history of the language, and don’t understand the nature of their own complaints – which are simply statements of preference for the way of doing things they have become used to. The erosion of language to the point that “ultimately, no doubt, we shall communicate with a series of grunts” (Humphrys again) will not, cannot, happen. The clearest evidence for this is that warnings about the deterioration of English have been around for a very long time.
On August 30, 1992, the collision of two of the most dominant pop cultural forces of 1992 was captured in a single moment of grainy video. Leading up to Nirvana’s legendary set at the Reading Festival in southeast England, Kurt Cobain was pushed out onto the stage in a wheelchair. Dressed in a hospital gown as a sarcastic nod to media reports about his supposedly failing health, the wiseass lead singer used the microphone stand to pull himself up before belting out the first line of Bette Midler’s “The Rose.” Then, he staged a dramatic backward pratfall to the ground, where he stayed for a few seconds before standing up, grabbing his guitar, and launching into “Breed.”
What you don’t see in the official recording is the footage of Cobain before he and the rest of Nirvana come on. Director Brett Morgen’s documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, however, opens with a clip of the frontman and those pre-show moments. While wearing a shearling coat and a long blond wig, Cobain peeks out at the crowd of 50,000, turns back, takes a drag from a cigarette, inches very close to the camera, and then he says it: “Party on, Wayne.”
As you might surmise from the peachy, fleshy fungi laid out on its cover, The Collection is an ethnography of the penis. It’s a nouveau roman-esque narrative about Jeanne, a woman who has methodical, anonymous sexual encounters in a series of hotel rooms across Paris with men she picks up on the street. She seems in particular to enjoy fellatio, memorising each member she encounters, storing it away in her “memory palace”. She doesn’t remember anything else about the men, and she doesn’t compare them with one another, simply files away the image to recall when she pleases: “Jeanne only has to cross the threshold and she rediscovers the shape, the form, the particular warmth, the density, the smell of the penis; the elasticity of the tissue and its colour when drawn tight and when slackened; the smooth or glistening appearance of the head; the network of bluish blood vessels; the shaded areas; the wrinkled fingerprint skin of the testicles; the growth pattern of the hairs.”
But while Ketcham’s screed and McCann’s poetic tragedy seem like superficial opposites, they communicate in their spiritual depths and there’s a benefit in reading them together, for the passions they channel have a common source: the American West and what has become of it. A story that’s ours to tell, and ours to change.