Loop
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Winner PEN Translates Award (UK)
Recovering from an unspecified accident, the narrator of Loop finds herself in waiting rooms of different kinds: airport departure lounges, doctors’ surgeries, and above all at home, awaiting the return of her boyfriend, who has travelled to Spain following the death of his mother. Loop is a love story told from the perspective of a contemporary Penelope who, instead of weaving and unravelling her shroud, writes and erases her thoughts in her ‘ideal’ notebook. At once, funny and thought-provoking, her thoughts range from her stationery preferences to the different scales on which life is lived, while a cast of unlikely characters cross the page, from Proust to a mysterious dwarf, from a dreamy cat to David Bowie singing ‘Wild is the Wind’. Written in an assured, irreverent style, Loop is the journal of an absence, one in which the most minute or whimsical observations open up universes. Combining aphoristic fragments with introspective narrative, and evoking Italo Calvino and Fernando Pessoa in its playfulness and wry humour, this original reflection on relationships, solitude and the purpose of writing offers a glimpse of contemporary life in Mexico City, while asking what it really means to find our place in the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mexican writer Lozano's PEN Translation Prize–winning novel, her English-language debut, pulls off a dizzying chronicle of a woman's antics as she waits in Mexico City for her boyfriend to return from Spain. Jonás left following the death of his mother, and the unnamed narrator has been left to indulge in her obsessions, including her Scribe and Ideal notebooks, which she uses for diary entries and fiction writing, respectively; David Bowie's "Wild is the Wind" (she prefers the original recording; Jonás likes the Nina Simone cover); and the process of recovering from an unspecified accident that took place before Jonás's departure (her doctor recommended daily afternoon walks). As she turns these obsessions over in her head and repeats her routine, she begins to unravel ("Unlearning yourself is more important than knowing yourself"). She imagines one of her notebooks as the sea, and its lines as waves. Waiting for Jonás, meanwhile, becomes an existential, Beckettesque situation. Lozano's playful prose and imagery propel the book forward, despite its loose shape and lack of plot. It adds up to a delightful meditation on waiting, love, and the inevitability of change.
