... a glorious tapestry of literary enthusiasms. Brenda Lozano is among several contemporary Mexican writers whose playfully innovative work has met with acclaim in the UK ... Loop reads like a confessional essay rather than fiction, and like Luiselli’s first novel Faces in the Crowd, it plays with the idea of keeping readers guessing whether it conjures an entirely imaginative world, or represents a kind of autofiction ... Lozano wants the book to feel like coming upon a diary. Its cryptic swivels from one subject to another and its loose, allusive structure give the illusion that it has been thrown together, but the result is far more artful than that.
True to its title, Lozano’s book does go round and round in circles. And though it doesn’t feel intended to alienate, it does reside comfortably on the more experimental end of the spectrum ... The novel’s real action is the narrator’s stream of thought as she ponders subjects from the very small to the very large ... Pulsing beneath the diaristic rhythm of the novel, sometimes erupting to its surface, are the troubles of the narrator’s country.
A form of literary dumpster diving, Loop is nourished on what most novels discard. Zipping along with the kind of whimsical, non-linear vignettes that animated Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Lozano’s anti-novel throws down nodal points of entry and departure to create seemingly random junctions between mythology, fairy tale, pop culture and literature ... Equal parts sorrowful and hopeful, playful and serious, diary and fable, Loop can be read as many things. It can be read as a lament for a species whose greed and obsession with success has made it lose perspective and exaggerate its proportions, and which now threatens to erase itself from history like writing on the sand. It can be read as a manifesto for realist magic as opposed to magic realism. It can be read aloud between lovers or in solitary silence. But most important of all, it should be read, period.
... the novel is filled with many...weird and wonderful curiosities. The narrator’s journaling is confessional and freely associative, almost a stream-of-consciousness ... The cascading, scattered quality of the novel imitates the patterns of actual thought. Ideas emerge and overlap and blend together; the same anxieties and obsessions intrude again and again; a resurfaced memory or random encounter sets off a chain reaction of emotions. But Loop’s meandering structure also reflects its narrator’s concerns about living in a culture fixated on productivity and efficiency ... our narrator proves the profound importance of such useless endeavors, as it is our hobbies and personal interests and passion projects that make and keep us whole. Ultimately, Loop is a manifesto for inefficiency, even in the way it’s written—digressive, circuitous, goalless ... very much a writer’s novel: our narrator is a writer who writes about writing ... Lozano honors the patterns of life outside of literature. In life, there is no clear climax, no neat resolution.
The deceptively simple structure—intimate, charming, informal—allows for a great range of ideas and observations that loop and recur ... With a light, playful touch, Lozano richly layers scenes and details, connecting ideas and weaving her story like Penelope at her loom. An intimate book that starts small and expands steadily outward, with a cumulative effect both moving and hopeful.
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.
