The Uruguayan novelist Mario Levrero, who died in 2004, is beloved among Latin American readers for his gleeful weirdness. Empty Words, the sixth of Levrero's ten novels, certainly qualifies as a strange thing: a novel pretending to be a series of handwriting exercises, which are meant to have no content at all.
Levrero opens Empty Words with an announcement. "My graphological self-therapy begins today," his unnamed narrator declares. His plan is to improve his handwriting, on the theory that "changes in behavior can lead to changes on a psychological level."
Evidently, the risk of boredom here is high. Levrero points this out constantly, scolding himself on the page whenever he veers into writing that engages his mind rather than reinforcing the habit of crossing his Ts.
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.
Empty Words has about as much of a plot as life does. The narrator is highly anxious, though he tries not to take his anxiety seriously. His mother is getting older, he has writer's block, and his marriage is on the rocks. His stepson takes little interest in him, so he devotes most of his time and emotional energy to Pongo, the dog.
This is the core of Empty Words. In order to free himself to write fiction, the narrator must discipline his writing and his mind, which become close to synonymous. But in order to discipline his writing, he has to write.
After a series of dramatic moments in the narrator's life and in Pongo's, Empty Words returns to emptiness. The narrator sharpens his focus. He devotes a full paragraph to practicing Rs: "rhododendron, rower, sombrero, bra-strap, parricide, reverberate, procrastinate, corduroys (I repeat: corduroys)." Here, the writer's joy in writing shines through. Liberated from the pressure to produce — or avoid — content, he can delight in actual words. It's the first time he has fun on the page.
