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brezaja's review against another edition
5.0
It’s so weird that I feel like I myself wrote this book. A lot of the thoughts I have about life or even about the untapped parts of my identity that I know are there, he nailed perfectly.
I’m going to be adapting this style of journaling, I’ve struggled with finding the practicality or the reasoning behind why people do it, but now I’ve found a method or two that works for me.
I’m going to be adapting this style of journaling, I’ve struggled with finding the practicality or the reasoning behind why people do it, but now I’ve found a method or two that works for me.
philippsburg's review against another edition
hopeful
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
600bars's review
4.0
This book consists of journal entries of a man who is trying to do handwriting exercises and therefore not focus on the content of the entries at all. They consist of him being like “ah, omg I stopped thinking about the letters I need to focus on relaxing my arm!” then he starts talking about his dog or something and then goes ”ah! No! I started focusing on content again!” over and over. It’s very dull and repetitive because he’s trying to do this as a self improvement meditation exercise. But of course, there’s hints of more because he can’t avoid thinking while doing his supposedly mindless exercises.
Levrero is extremely frustrated by the business of life, the constant noise and chaos, and wants time to just sit and think and get his shit together. He lives with his wife and child, and I was getting the vibe that the child was the wife’s kid and that he was the newest addition to the household, but I can’t remember if that was in fact the case. Regardless, he seems constantly frustrated with family life. It’s not that he dislikes Alicia or Ignacio or the pets, but hates that life with them gives him no time to have any peace. “I’m bound by the omnipotent will of a woman who is in turn completely bound by social conventions, an activist fighting for the cause of wakefulness, a solar woman (and I’m a lunar man). I wonder how much longer I’ll put up with this way of “life” , in which the essential, profound, true, authentic questions, for which we are created– are consistently displaced, indefinitely postponed, forgotten, and sometimes even abused”(66).
I completely understand this feeling, but have issues with the last sentence. Whenever I’m in a busy season of life, like the last few weeks, I lament the fact that I have no time to work on any of my self improvement schemes or be in a healthy routine and get all the reading and exercising and time to myself I want. But doing things with friends and family just IS the essential goodness of life, and I can’t spend all my time contemplating and preparing for life rather than living it. I guess it’s different when you’re only dragged to your wife’s social events, while I am currently exhausted because I’ve been at the state fair and weddings and concerts and seeing friends from out of town. I am just glad I read this at this time, because I have caught myself thinking similarly, like “I’ve had no time to read lately and my exercise routine is out the window!” when I should be happy to be having a busy calendar. I think I said something similar in my review of Drifts by Kate Zambreno, that authors (and myself) are always yearning for a monastic existence to ponder and contemplate, but that I’ve personally found that I tend to waste those periods doing nothing bc of a lack of stimuli and most of my learning and creativity comes in busier times. (within reason—Levrero isn’t really working all that much in this time period he’s complaining about, being burned out & exhausted from shit you HAVE to do like being overworked is another matter entirely). I just felt frustrated with Levrero for his annoyance with his family. I thought he should be more loving to them, but remembered that my journals feature far more complaining than gushing and are not all that reflective of the actual characterization of those relationships.
I could also relate to the feeling of not having time to be yourself. I feel this way when I have too much going on and have no time to fold a grid or do whatever it is I spend my alone time doing. But it’s this weird dual thing where you can’t win, because when I am very busy and ~living life~ I wish I had time to work on myself, and then when I’m in my work on myself mode I’m like this is so lame I should be out in the world doing stuff and having fun. It feels like “me” is always one step away from me! “I have no excuse for this interminable postponement of my own self, except laziness, except stupidity, except negligence” (59).
The postponement of the self is also present in the idea that if you can just fix X, real life will actually begin. Like Levrero, I’m nearly always mired in a self-improvement scheme that usually goes nowhere. I always think that if I can change this one thing, everything else will be easier/better, but of course I either abandon the one thing or the goalposts shift. “Any movement toward a goal will be immediately diverted toward another goal, and so on, and the movement toward the original goal may or may not ever be resumed“ (17). Levrero is slightly kidding himself about these handwriting exercises being the key to solving all of life’s problems. “I try not to lose the slow deliberate meditative quality of my writing, because i know these daily exercises will do wonders for my health and character, transforming a whole plethora of of bad behaviors into good ones and catapulting me blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money and success with women in and in other games of chance” (7).
Because my to-do list never ever ends, I’ve never experienced the satisfaction of being done and I have a sneaking suspicion I would feel deeply unmoored if I weren’t avoiding doing something and had absolutely nothing hanging over my head. Levrero comes to the same conclusion: “I was also distracted by the memory of a surprising discovery I made yesterday afternoon during my siesta: namely, that I find the sensation of being relaxed, especially when accompanied by a marked tranquility of mind, profoundly unpleasant. (115)”. HE’S SO RIGHT FOR THAT lol
This book is at once extremely boring and repetitive, but also made me introspect on my own relationships, and to remind myself that relationships are the most fundamental thing and that I should not be so mentally absent. I originally picked this book up because I completely changed my own handwriting over the course of about a year, though for me I did it while bored in school so I didn’t have to focus on not focusing on the content. When I need to test a pen or practice some cursive, I usually write whatever song lyrics I’m listening to or whatever words people say out loud. I’ve seriously regretted this before. I had a chalk wall when I was a teen. One day I got these chalk markers instead of regular chalk. I wrote the lyrics to the song that was playing to test them out. I did not even like that song. The stupid fucking chalk markers did not erase and I was stuck with these extremely dumb lyrics on my wall for a decade as if they were meaningful to me, and they were not, they literally just happened to be playing. ugh I still get annoyed when I think about this.
Levrero is extremely frustrated by the business of life, the constant noise and chaos, and wants time to just sit and think and get his shit together. He lives with his wife and child, and I was getting the vibe that the child was the wife’s kid and that he was the newest addition to the household, but I can’t remember if that was in fact the case. Regardless, he seems constantly frustrated with family life. It’s not that he dislikes Alicia or Ignacio or the pets, but hates that life with them gives him no time to have any peace. “I’m bound by the omnipotent will of a woman who is in turn completely bound by social conventions, an activist fighting for the cause of wakefulness, a solar woman (and I’m a lunar man). I wonder how much longer I’ll put up with this way of “life” , in which the essential, profound, true, authentic questions, for which we are created– are consistently displaced, indefinitely postponed, forgotten, and sometimes even abused”(66).
I completely understand this feeling, but have issues with the last sentence. Whenever I’m in a busy season of life, like the last few weeks, I lament the fact that I have no time to work on any of my self improvement schemes or be in a healthy routine and get all the reading and exercising and time to myself I want. But doing things with friends and family just IS the essential goodness of life, and I can’t spend all my time contemplating and preparing for life rather than living it. I guess it’s different when you’re only dragged to your wife’s social events, while I am currently exhausted because I’ve been at the state fair and weddings and concerts and seeing friends from out of town. I am just glad I read this at this time, because I have caught myself thinking similarly, like “I’ve had no time to read lately and my exercise routine is out the window!” when I should be happy to be having a busy calendar. I think I said something similar in my review of Drifts by Kate Zambreno, that authors (and myself) are always yearning for a monastic existence to ponder and contemplate, but that I’ve personally found that I tend to waste those periods doing nothing bc of a lack of stimuli and most of my learning and creativity comes in busier times. (within reason—Levrero isn’t really working all that much in this time period he’s complaining about, being burned out & exhausted from shit you HAVE to do like being overworked is another matter entirely). I just felt frustrated with Levrero for his annoyance with his family. I thought he should be more loving to them, but remembered that my journals feature far more complaining than gushing and are not all that reflective of the actual characterization of those relationships.
I could also relate to the feeling of not having time to be yourself. I feel this way when I have too much going on and have no time to fold a grid or do whatever it is I spend my alone time doing. But it’s this weird dual thing where you can’t win, because when I am very busy and ~living life~ I wish I had time to work on myself, and then when I’m in my work on myself mode I’m like this is so lame I should be out in the world doing stuff and having fun. It feels like “me” is always one step away from me! “I have no excuse for this interminable postponement of my own self, except laziness, except stupidity, except negligence” (59).
The postponement of the self is also present in the idea that if you can just fix X, real life will actually begin. Like Levrero, I’m nearly always mired in a self-improvement scheme that usually goes nowhere. I always think that if I can change this one thing, everything else will be easier/better, but of course I either abandon the one thing or the goalposts shift. “Any movement toward a goal will be immediately diverted toward another goal, and so on, and the movement toward the original goal may or may not ever be resumed“ (17). Levrero is slightly kidding himself about these handwriting exercises being the key to solving all of life’s problems. “I try not to lose the slow deliberate meditative quality of my writing, because i know these daily exercises will do wonders for my health and character, transforming a whole plethora of of bad behaviors into good ones and catapulting me blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money and success with women in and in other games of chance” (7).
Because my to-do list never ever ends, I’ve never experienced the satisfaction of being done and I have a sneaking suspicion I would feel deeply unmoored if I weren’t avoiding doing something and had absolutely nothing hanging over my head. Levrero comes to the same conclusion: “I was also distracted by the memory of a surprising discovery I made yesterday afternoon during my siesta: namely, that I find the sensation of being relaxed, especially when accompanied by a marked tranquility of mind, profoundly unpleasant. (115)”. HE’S SO RIGHT FOR THAT lol
This book is at once extremely boring and repetitive, but also made me introspect on my own relationships, and to remind myself that relationships are the most fundamental thing and that I should not be so mentally absent. I originally picked this book up because I completely changed my own handwriting over the course of about a year, though for me I did it while bored in school so I didn’t have to focus on not focusing on the content. When I need to test a pen or practice some cursive, I usually write whatever song lyrics I’m listening to or whatever words people say out loud. I’ve seriously regretted this before. I had a chalk wall when I was a teen. One day I got these chalk markers instead of regular chalk. I wrote the lyrics to the song that was playing to test them out. I did not even like that song. The stupid fucking chalk markers did not erase and I was stuck with these extremely dumb lyrics on my wall for a decade as if they were meaningful to me, and they were not, they literally just happened to be playing. ugh I still get annoyed when I think about this.
kilburnadam's review against another edition
5.0
Empty Words is a novel by Uruguayan author Mario Levrero, written in diary format, that follows the narrator's attempts to improve his handwriting as a form of self-therapy. Through diligent daily practice, the narrator hopes to alter his personality, but he struggles with distractions and frustrations from daily life. The novel is split into two parts: "Exercises" and "The Empty Discourse." The former involves free writing aimed at therapeutic reconciliation, while the latter focuses on the narrator's attempt to make sense of himself through words. Dreams and Freudian terminology are frequently mentioned, as the narrator struggles with psychological stress and physical degradation from excessive smoking and lack of exercise. The author admits to falling into his own traps, and as he writes about his dog Pongo, he sees a parallel between himself and the needy and neglected dog. Anxiety ratchets up when he moves into a new house near an electric substation that won't stop buzzing. Despite his unhappiness, the author believes he cannot escape the tangle of consequences and must find his lost self among new patterns and learn to live differently.
cdelorenzo's review against another edition
5.0
“una vida sin alicientes (alicientes=Alicia, buen juego inconsciente de palabras)”.
“Digamos que esta es una extraña forma de vida; uno vive, y piensa, siempre en función de otra persona que por lo general no está presente y que, por lo general, nunca puede saberse con certeza cuándo va a estarlo”.
“Noto también que la Z es una letra que no me sale bien; no la tengo dominada (…). Es una grave falla de la letra manuscrita de nuestro idioma, eso de que no pueda escribirse sin levantar el lápiz; aunque tal vez en otros idiomas las cosas son todavía peores”.
“Cuando se llega a cierta edad, uno deja de ser el protagonista de sus acciones: todo se ha transformado en puras consecuencias de acciones anteriores”.
“Digamos que esta es una extraña forma de vida; uno vive, y piensa, siempre en función de otra persona que por lo general no está presente y que, por lo general, nunca puede saberse con certeza cuándo va a estarlo”.
“Noto también que la Z es una letra que no me sale bien; no la tengo dominada (…). Es una grave falla de la letra manuscrita de nuestro idioma, eso de que no pueda escribirse sin levantar el lápiz; aunque tal vez en otros idiomas las cosas son todavía peores”.
“Cuando se llega a cierta edad, uno deja de ser el protagonista de sus acciones: todo se ha transformado en puras consecuencias de acciones anteriores”.
mconstantina_rx's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Beautiful, riveting piece. Written in an autobiographical style, this unassuming book was truly laced with wit in the midst of daily living and explores the human condition in dept.
While some may argue that the absence of any pictorial depiction of the handwriting exercises may seemingly be jarring, I would argue that that this was an intentional choice made to play up the irony of the supposed typography exercise turned literary musing sort of journey the narrator is undertaking. In fact the narrator’s attempt to illustrate correcting what he perceived as typography errors- such as through the repetition of certain words enable the readers to look past the surface of how the word may simply visually look or sound in the sentence and forces us to examine the crux of what the narrator is trying to say.
In writing about our interactions with the world around us, our perceptions are laid on the table and the intimate undressing of the self remains a fine-lined delicacy people of this age should cultivate a taste for.
While some may argue that the absence of any pictorial depiction of the handwriting exercises may seemingly be jarring, I would argue that that this was an intentional choice made to play up the irony of the supposed typography exercise turned literary musing sort of journey the narrator is undertaking. In fact the narrator’s attempt to illustrate correcting what he perceived as typography errors- such as through the repetition of certain words enable the readers to look past the surface of how the word may simply visually look or sound in the sentence and forces us to examine the crux of what the narrator is trying to say.
Content Warnings
Minor: Mental illness and Animal cruelty
jormanks's review against another edition
3.0
No sé si está bien la calificación. El libro es una muestra del afán de una persona deprimida por querer mejorar, y de las constantes excusas que encuentra para no hacerlo. Y me identifico con eso.
Pero, además, es una muestra de lo que alguien siente cuando escribe, esa reflexión que actúa como un reflejo al enfrentarse a un papel. Mejor dicho, que nada es como uno quiere, ni termina siendo lo que debería.
Al ser un ejercicio así de íntimo no sé que pensar del libro como tal. ¿Es publicado por ser un autor de culto? La calidad de los escritos no se cuestiona, ni las numerosas reflexiones que allí se presentan, pero siento que esto es tal vez una correspondencia con uno mismo, en un acto más bien desesperado.
Pero, además, es una muestra de lo que alguien siente cuando escribe, esa reflexión que actúa como un reflejo al enfrentarse a un papel. Mejor dicho, que nada es como uno quiere, ni termina siendo lo que debería.
Al ser un ejercicio así de íntimo no sé que pensar del libro como tal. ¿Es publicado por ser un autor de culto? La calidad de los escritos no se cuestiona, ni las numerosas reflexiones que allí se presentan, pero siento que esto es tal vez una correspondencia con uno mismo, en un acto más bien desesperado.
hypops's review
2.0
As a book, Levrero’s Empty Words is not a great read; however, as an experimental record of a year in the author’s life, it’s moderately interesting.
When Levrero undertakes his project to improve his handwriting, he intends it as a meditative daily practice that might allow him to focus on the literal act of writing, and thereby, so he hopes, to reveal to himself the mystery of his own hang-ups. It’s a kind of self-therapy that, as you might guess, fails miserably.
He’s a middle-aged Uruguayan man whose domestic life seems defined by his feeling “marginalized” by his wife and series of maids, and who finds a disturbingly abusive kinship with his dog Pongo. He’s not a sympathetic character, even though he perpetually seems in need of reassurance, praise, and care.
The book also is strange in that it’s so intensely focused on his handwriting, but his handwriting has been “translated” from his written script into typed script (for publication) and has again been translated from Spanish to English. Needless to say, much is lost in each process, so much in fact, that I’m not sure what one might take from the book after reading it.
When Levrero undertakes his project to improve his handwriting, he intends it as a meditative daily practice that might allow him to focus on the literal act of writing, and thereby, so he hopes, to reveal to himself the mystery of his own hang-ups. It’s a kind of self-therapy that, as you might guess, fails miserably.
He’s a middle-aged Uruguayan man whose domestic life seems defined by his feeling “marginalized” by his wife and series of maids, and who finds a disturbingly abusive kinship with his dog Pongo. He’s not a sympathetic character, even though he perpetually seems in need of reassurance, praise, and care.
The book also is strange in that it’s so intensely focused on his handwriting, but his handwriting has been “translated” from his written script into typed script (for publication) and has again been translated from Spanish to English. Needless to say, much is lost in each process, so much in fact, that I’m not sure what one might take from the book after reading it.