cuaderno ideal / loop (brenda lozano, tr annie mcdermott)

I slightly regretted looking up the author and discovering that far from being the quiet marginal figure that this novel suggests, she is in fact a player in the Mexican literary scene, who was immersed in controversy when AMLO chose her to be cultural attache to Madrid, an offer that was subsequently rescinded. Loop, or to translate its Spanish title more accurately The Ideal Notebook, a pun on a brand which is also the book’s quest, to find or perhaps create an ideal notebook, is a short, discursive text which feels as though it has been cobbled together with bits of string. It transpires during the time that the narrator’s partner, Jonas, has left her to go to Spain to mourn the death of her mother. Whilst he is gone, the narrator pines for him, sees friends, hangs out, cogitates about Proust or Bolaño or Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, among others, and goes on a couple of trips herself. It’s a deliberately lightweight floaty book. The swallow is a recurring image, and like a swallow, Lozano’s writing seems to glide on her thought processes, sometimes darting, at others giving the impression that the text is scarcely moving at all. Lozano’s text belongs to a school of writing, of which Luiselli is perhaps the most celebrated exponent, the novel as literary journal, and in spite of the limitations of this format, Lozano pulls it off with a marginal charm.