Transcription
As talky and thinky as a memory play, sweeping up Kafka, Covid, glass flowers and much else in its narrow, rushing stream, it’s about how technology can sustain as well as stultify life ... A familiar story about the dynamic between an accomplished but distant father and the son who cannot quite reach him ... More of an exercise than a sporting event, like a powerlifter hoisting a Magic 8 Ball, the — yep! — triangle with its oracular messages bobbing within.
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There is so much silence in this novel, so much air ... A novel speaks, yes, but it can also listen ... I suspect what is so interesting to Lerner about new technologies are the opportunities for misunderstanding that they introduce. Transcription is a chronicle of that confusion ... Struggling to describe the shape of this book just now, I reached for a pair of tights on the floor, dreadfully torn and twisted. That is the experience of this book, I thought, poking at the ladders; you fall straight through the story, just like its characters.
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Remarkable ... The novel is by turns slapstick and sincere in its consideration of digital devices ... Feels like a step toward drama. It is by far his shortest novel—a short novel by anyone’s standards—and much of it is dialogue ... From book to book, his writing crackles with new insights, images, motifs—or are they old? Glass flowers, Beethoven’s stick, your mother’s voice. They all come back around, and the novel is well suited to represent these ruptures in time, to bear the pressures of the past.
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