Take a photo of a barcode or cover
jdscott50 's review for:
The Transcriptionist
by Amy Rowland
The Transcriptionist
Lena is a transcriptionist at The Record (a sort of faux New York Times). She is the last vestige of a dying role in a fading industry. This ephemeral state has left her unsettled as of late. She hears the reporters calling in reporting various horrors and she must play them back and transcribe them. A reporter talks about the war in Iraq, how an explosion in a marketplace has blown off the foot of a young man; another reports on a mudslide in Pakistan and how the families will continue to dig until they find their lost loved ones. The stories become too much to bear, creating a crisis for Lena. She suffers severe migraines and is generally depressed. One evening, she meets a blind woman on the subway who comforts her. She is a court reporter who must transcribe similar horrors and atrocities. She talks of how she had to transcribe a recording of a child screaming not wanting to go with her father during a custody dispute. How does she transcribe the screaming? Lena discovers later that this same fellow recorder is found dead inside the lion’s cage at the zoo, mauled to death. The story and the subsequent aftermath push Lena over the edge, forcing her to confront her actions and find out the truth.
Much of this story reminded me of Tethered by Amy MacKinnon. In that story a fragile mortician who faces death everyday has to find a way to deal with it without her faith. Lena has also turned away from her Catholic upbringing hoping the written word would be her own faith. Books like Middlemarch become her Bible. However, she also loses that core and now only uses it to distance herself from others instead of using her own voice and her own thoughts. This is one of the main points of the story. Those who report in to her for dictation pass the words and stories through her and she cannot find her own. She begins to unravel very early in the story. It has a very Twilight Zone kind of feel. She calls into to her own dictation phone and leaves messages for herself and sometimes for the dead woman killed by lions. She begins to feel the same way as if she herself is disappearing into vapor. She only finds herself when she stands up for herself and who she is.
The story is a long slow descent into a somewhat madness. Rowland doesn’t take it that far, but Lena seemingly skirts on the edge of depression and suicide. The blind court reporter could be her future and most of the story is taken up with that obsession. Most of this story takes place around 2004 and it becomes a key point to the story even though it feels like a hollow resurrection. The Iraq War and some notorious reporting in the fictional The Record are reminiscent of the planted stories from the Pentagon in the New York Times around the same period. This aspect didn’t seem to fit and it doesn’t seem to redeem or resolve Lena’s character. In my mind, that doesn’t seem to be a strong enough revelation to break her from her spell.
This was an incredibly difficult book to review and I would imagine even more difficult to blurb. There seems to be two aspects to the story, the ephermal nature of the transcriptionist, and the corruption of the newspaper. They don't seem connected and they don't resolve one another. I couldn't get what the author was going for in the resolution. Her story alone was good and had the best resolution she could have had making it satisfying, but disjointed story.
Lena is a transcriptionist at The Record (a sort of faux New York Times). She is the last vestige of a dying role in a fading industry. This ephemeral state has left her unsettled as of late. She hears the reporters calling in reporting various horrors and she must play them back and transcribe them. A reporter talks about the war in Iraq, how an explosion in a marketplace has blown off the foot of a young man; another reports on a mudslide in Pakistan and how the families will continue to dig until they find their lost loved ones. The stories become too much to bear, creating a crisis for Lena. She suffers severe migraines and is generally depressed. One evening, she meets a blind woman on the subway who comforts her. She is a court reporter who must transcribe similar horrors and atrocities. She talks of how she had to transcribe a recording of a child screaming not wanting to go with her father during a custody dispute. How does she transcribe the screaming? Lena discovers later that this same fellow recorder is found dead inside the lion’s cage at the zoo, mauled to death. The story and the subsequent aftermath push Lena over the edge, forcing her to confront her actions and find out the truth.
Much of this story reminded me of Tethered by Amy MacKinnon. In that story a fragile mortician who faces death everyday has to find a way to deal with it without her faith. Lena has also turned away from her Catholic upbringing hoping the written word would be her own faith. Books like Middlemarch become her Bible. However, she also loses that core and now only uses it to distance herself from others instead of using her own voice and her own thoughts. This is one of the main points of the story. Those who report in to her for dictation pass the words and stories through her and she cannot find her own. She begins to unravel very early in the story. It has a very Twilight Zone kind of feel. She calls into to her own dictation phone and leaves messages for herself and sometimes for the dead woman killed by lions. She begins to feel the same way as if she herself is disappearing into vapor. She only finds herself when she stands up for herself and who she is.
The story is a long slow descent into a somewhat madness. Rowland doesn’t take it that far, but Lena seemingly skirts on the edge of depression and suicide. The blind court reporter could be her future and most of the story is taken up with that obsession. Most of this story takes place around 2004 and it becomes a key point to the story even though it feels like a hollow resurrection. The Iraq War and some notorious reporting in the fictional The Record are reminiscent of the planted stories from the Pentagon in the New York Times around the same period. This aspect didn’t seem to fit and it doesn’t seem to redeem or resolve Lena’s character. In my mind, that doesn’t seem to be a strong enough revelation to break her from her spell.
This was an incredibly difficult book to review and I would imagine even more difficult to blurb. There seems to be two aspects to the story, the ephermal nature of the transcriptionist, and the corruption of the newspaper. They don't seem connected and they don't resolve one another. I couldn't get what the author was going for in the resolution. Her story alone was good and had the best resolution she could have had making it satisfying, but disjointed story.