Empty Words is never boring. Levrero is too talented a writer—and McDermott too talented a translator—for that. The narrator is funny and self-deprecating, earning the reader's affection with his half-earnest efforts to quit smoking and fully earnest diatribes against his wife's cat. Reading his exercises is relaxing, like sitting at the kitchen table and chatting with a friend. As a result, the novel slides by effortlessly, so smoothly written that it's easy to miss the bits of plot peeking in ... [There's] a charming narrator, winning in his self-deprecation and humor, and so the reader increasingly roots for him ... the writer's joy in writing shines through.
... charming, hilarious and often insightful ... Levrero's prose is often poetic and slightly winking throughout; he knows that his hero is a bit ridiculous but likes him regardless. (And translator Annie McDermott has done an impeccable job adapting him.) ... Levrero...shares the tendency of Borges and Lispector to reach epiphany through roundabouts and the gleeful embrace of the strange ... Hopefully this isn't the first and last of Levrero's works to be translated.
I half-wondered if Empty Words was his shot at Thomas Bernhard; in particular, the Austrian’s 1982 novel Concrete, about another sickly procrastinator blaming all and sundry for his inability to finish a book, although Levrero—at least on this evidence—feels the sunnier writer, relishing the mundane comedy of household dynamics as much as more cosmic jokes of existence. Just as you’re wondering where it’s all going, a last-minute revelation concerning the narrator’s mother confirms a lingering suspicion that the real action in this teasing jeu d’esprit lies between the lines, not on them, as the writing itself begins to look like a form of displacement activity. As a calling card for Levrero’s talent, it’s certainly enticing.
... the narrator wages a guerrilla war on meaning by constantly harping on the act of writing and questioning its relation to physical reality ... What results is a very funny satire on the realistic novel with its emphasis on character development, progress from one point to another, big themes of love and hate, life and death and so on ... Mario Levrero’s brilliant little tour de force, first published in 1996, is an extremely realistic book. It captures the daily self-interrupting chatter of the mind which goes hither and yon, notices odds and ends, does not narrate from a beginning to middle and end. What makes us on a daily basis is not tragedy or even pain, nor sparks of joy. It is thinking about where I left my keys, dreading that interview, wondering if there are enough potatoes for dinner, sighing at the rain.
Empty Words is a very funny, very sad reflection on the ways people try (and fail) to simplify their lives ... Perhaps that is what Levrero thinks of self-help programs, that they become one more overbearing thing on an overwhelming to-do list. In the protagonist’s case, if he was trying to find relief from the emotional and intellectual work of life by reimagining handwriting as a Zen-like practice of 'invisible work,' he picked the wrong manual task. Handwriting is the ultimate in visible work—script, scrawl, or chicken scratch, it is the tool through which thoughts grow visible and complicated.
What is stranger than the narrator’s estrangement from himself is the foregrounded estrangement of the reader from the text, or any text, where words threaten to be 'empty,' incomplete signifiers. We are not explicitly told why the exercises come to an end, or if they do at all, but are instead left with a text that operates as a metacommentary on writing ... That this is done throughout with humor, self-deprecating yet sincere introspection, and poetic insights into the mundane life of the narrator is Levrero’s primary success. Ultimately, Empty Words is a sufficiently striking full-length introduction of Levrero to the English-speaking world, as well as a not-too-serious reflection on the possibilities of writing and its relationship with internal and external worlds.
... a tantalizing look at [Levrero's] strange and prodigious talent ... strange in the best ways ... the text is expansive, bringing moments of quick lyricism ... Levrero has a singular wit that McDermott captures with a light touch. The novel is very funny ... Levrero believes in the incantatory, the experimental tradition of magic, and the avant garde. He’s an important voice within this tradition, and his 'graphological-self therapy' offers readers another way of seeing. Strange and delightful.
More than just an exercise in chasing his own tail, Levrero takes himself into dangerous psychological territory...anxiety builds, he smokes like a chimney, he bloats and becomes listless—and then comes, if not a breakthrough, at least the emergence of some interesting if sometimes unpleasant sketches ... A curious, even eccentric book, and a must-read for fans of post-boom Latin American literature.
... [a] charming novel ... The narrator’s histrionics over his mundane responsibilities may be laughable, but his anxieties and preoccupations are captured with such precision by Levrero that the reader will breathe a sigh of relief whenever the exercises resume after a stress-induced break.
