París

París

Novel
Penguin Random House , 1979, 2008, 2010
155 pages

Along with The Place and The City, Paris makes up the Involuntary Trilogy (involuntary in the sense that the author only realized afterwards that he had written three novels in a row with the city as a common theme.

Paris is the story of someone who returns to a city where he has perhaps never been before. His return voyage has taken three hundred centuries and what he finds is the rusty shadow of a dead time: a taxi full of cobwebs with the corpse of the driver at the wheel, a thick layer of dust covering it all, a strange encounter with Marcel, the manager of a shop where he, it seems, had once worked.

A Paris shrouded in the elusive matter of dreams and a protagonist who senses that he has come back to this city in expectation of some event which he cannot point his finger on. In a leap into the void, to meet death, the character discovers that he has wings and can fly and so can be reborn and free himself from a lost time and an absurd, useless existence.

Like Felisberto Hernández, Levrero is, above all, a writer about that which is ghostly, an alchemist who works with intimate spectres and the detritus of experience. Oliverio Coelho, Los Inrockuptibles

A legendary writer, Mario Levrero has gone from warranting consideration as an author of incontrovertible importance to that of a writer of the stature of the great names in Latin American literature: Borges, Onetti, Piglia, Aira, Fogwill. Constantino Bértolo

Published in Spanish world-wide by Random House Mondadori/ Hebrew  Carmel / Denmark Skjodt Forlag