Loop

April 12, 2021
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. Agent: Laura Palomares, Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells.

Starred review from April 15, 2021
Winner of a PEN Translates award and the first of Mexican author Lozano's works to appear in English, this novel assumes the shape of a diary kept by a young woman in Mexico City. When her boyfriend, grieving his mother's death, leaves for Spain on a family trip, the unnamed narrator is left waiting for him to return. Before falling in love with Jon�s, she suffered a serious accident in which she nearly died. Writing short entries in her diary, she details her quest to find the perfect notebook, muses on music she loves, and notes conversations with friends and books she's reading, the apartment she and Jon�s share, the news. The deceptively simple structure--intimate, charming, informal--allows for a great range of ideas and observations that loop and recur. If you are in danger of drowning, she learns, swim not forward but diagonally. "How do you swim diagonally in life?" she wonders, feeling as if the shore keeps getting farther away. A writer, she enthusiastically references everything from Greek mythology and the Bible to Proust, Machado de Assis, Disney, and Shakira. She is fascinated by ideas of scale, by the concept of the ideal, by the epidemic of violence in Mexico, the history of writing, art, gossip, waiting. She observes the cat, Telemachus; goes out with friends; travels to writing conferences; wonders if Penelope masturbated while waiting for Odysseus. She tells about "The Most Important Artist in Mexico" and invents "notebook proverbs": "The man in a suit walks to work, but the omniscient narrator describes him." She is skeptical of "useful things. Useful work, useful thoughts, useful phrases. Stories in which everything happens. A society that worships the verb. The famous concept of utility, the pursuit of usefulness." "I worship the margins," she tells us, "the secondary, the useless." Because "the more useless something is, the more subversive." 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.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.