Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review by Walter Cummins
The title defines the issue. This novel is a transcription of several experiences, especially conversations and interviews meant to serve as a reproduction of what really happened. But what is accurate, even if the source is someone at the center of the experience?
This short novel adds to the consideration of what a transcription is. Literally, it a verbatim version of a auditory proceeding such as a court trial testimony. We think of court stenographers clicking away at special machines and later computers used for a paper version of spoken words captured on a tape recorder. Now our cellphones capture all that was said and can even turn sound into type. We seek authenticity.
But is that possible? Is even a word for word duplication captured on a cellphone any more accurate than a memory words soon after they were spoken and, even more so, spoken years in the past?
Our fundamental human transcription is memory, and sometimes it emerges in spoken words or written words that when recorded result in a concrete record of what was articulated. Such a record in no way assures that the memory is accurate. Lerner’s novel reveals the deception of transcriptions again and again.
The novel’s characters test what is possible to know, with central roles for electronic devices and face-to-face exchanges. Beyond what people said to one another, there’s what a person—the unnamed narrator of the first to sections—remembers of past exchanges and what he told himself in his thoughts.
The first significant event is that the interviewer planned to use his cell phone both to record an interview with Thomas, his now ninety-year-old college mentor, and to make a FaceTime call to his 11-year-old daughter. But having checked into his hotel and filled the sink, he accidentally ruins the phone by knocking it into the water. Was that an accident or a Freudian slip?
They still have a long unrecorded discussion at Thomas’s house that the narrator reconstructs for an article he published and later used for talk he gave after Thomas’s death. Thomas’s son, Max, present for that talk, is furious at the license he believes the narrator took. In the novel’s third section, the record of his conversation with the narrator, he tells how he did use a functional phone to record his own interview with his father.
Recorded as a transcription or retold from a memory, the words of the telling seek to capture what the man did, saw, thought, dreamed, remembered, or misremembered. Beneath it all is the question of what actually took place in the narrator’s life and what was his own reconstruction. How do we achieve a transcription of reality?
One brief example of that difficulty involves Switzerland. The narrator tells Thomas he has never been there, but Thomas describes a dinner in Geneva that they both attended. He does it with some specificity: “We eat at Les Armures, near the cathedral, near the university. We had the large table outside, there were at least seven of us, all coming in for the little film. This was not easy to arrange. First it is raining and then the clouds break up and there is sun. We have this lovely meal in Switzerland. I make a toast to our film, no?” The narrator admits that he misremembered something that happened twenty years ago.
Yet did he? Does specificity assure accuracy? A more troubling matter involves the nature of a relationship the narrator’s wife, Mia, had with a Spaniard during a semester abroad. The man’s name was Andrés. What really happened comes down to two extensive versions of a very different story that involves much more than a matter of misremembering.
At the heart of the radically different memories is what the narrator was led to believe about Mia, whom he fell in love with in college and who later became his wife and mother of Eva. As students they had a dispute before Mia went off to study in Spain and connected with a man there. The mutual friend of Mia and the narrator, Anisa, provides him with extensive details about Mia’s relationship with Andrés—that he had followed her to New York to work in construction for her father, that they were living together in an apartment in Washington Heights, that he brought a dog, that Andrés hurt his hand on the job, that they relocated to an apartment that required them to give up the dog. Mia would be coming to Providence to finish a few courses.
The narrator has no reason to doubt Anisa and her details. They have become quite friendly, spending time together. But when he runs into Mia on the street, uncertain whether he should even talk to her, she tells him that none of this happened. Andrés, who had a daughter, never left Spain. Theirs was a brief affair. How and why has Anisa been so convincing?
Years later when the narrator comes to Madrid to give a talk about his conversation with the now-deceased Thomas, he thinks to Google Andrés for the first time in years and finds photos of him, in one with a likely son but none with the daughter Mia had told him about.
What is real? The novel ends with a brief epilogue quoted from an 1889 letter from Leopold Blaschka, a glass artist who created Harvard’s glass flower museum display. Anisa invited the narrator to meet her there, and he is astonished: “I joked with Anisa that these must be actual plants that some conceptual artist was claiming were glass.” He kept seeing the instantaneous shifting of the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next.
As the initial section about his interview with Thomas ends, the narrator speculates that Thomas was listening in on his landline conversation with Eva and, as an electronic music creator was also orchestrating his conversations that he calls “interferences,”, through underground glass filaments. He says to the readers of the novel, “You call this fiction, but it is more.” What can a transcription be?
