Transcription

Everything that happens, one might suppose, is recorded in that vast holding library called, “the past.” And yet the past seems remarkably indistinct at least from our standpoint in the present. It can unsettle one’s stomach, as sometimes happens when facing backward in a moving train. And even our strongest impressions of the past can, at times, be contradicted by others. Without direct access to the transcription, it is as though all we are and have been is fiction.

Ben Lerner’s short novel is divided into three segments. The first sees a writer visiting his aged mentor, Thomas, in order to interview him for a magazine. Unfortunately the phone with which he had intended to record their discussion is accidentally dropped in a show more sink full of water. In a pinch, the writer is forced to simply remember the evening and later, in part, fictionalize it. In the second segment we see the writer after having recounted the circumstances of what has become the last interview ever given by his mentor at a festschrift in his honour. The reaction of those learning that his published account was not so much a transcription as fiction startles him. In the final segment, Max, the son of the writer’s mentor, recounts some of his own interactions with his father as well as detailing the challenges of dealing with a daughter with an eating disorder. He is ostensibly speaking to the writer. But how much of his own account should be considered to be transcription or fiction?

This is an immensely subtle and thoughtful study of the nature of art, of the failure of communication, and the necessity for fiction in a universe which may or may not accommodate transcription. You can hardly imagine a writer better suited for this task than Ben Lerner. You will want to read this novel again almost immediately on finishing it. And you should.

Highly recommended. show less

This is the kind of novella that derives much of its power from instability and incompletion. The reader is never entirely on firm ground. Conversations drift, memory falters, technology mediates nearly every human interaction, and even the book’s structure seems designed to resist easy interpretation. Yet the novella’s ambiguities don’t feel careless. Lerner has created a work less interested in resolving mysteries than in dramatizing how fragile perception, recollection, and communication have become in contemporary life.

The novella revolves around three principal figures: the unnamed narrator, his elderly mentor Thomas, and Thomas’s son Max. The tripartite structure mirrors these relationships, though the symmetry seems show more intentionally imperfect. The central section is brief and almost spectral, functioning less as a conventional narrative chapter than as an interruption or echo chamber between the larger movements of the book. This section, “[Hotel Villa Real],” is intentionally disorienting. My instinct is that the brackets signify some form of instability or altered status. It feels bracketed off from ordinary narrative reality—less a fully embodied scene than a suspended commentary on the first section. The title itself likely gestures toward “realness” or authenticity, which is fitting because this section revolves around the narrator’s confession that the famous final interview was never truly recorded. The participants’ discomfort and disgust about this ruse stem not simply from dishonesty but from the destruction of archival certainty. Thomas’s final words—supposedly preserved for posterity—were in fact reconstructed through memory and interpretation.

The opening section, “Hotel Providence,” is perhaps the novella’s most immediately accessible portion. Lerner’s rendering of Providence and the environs of Brown University is remarkably vivid. The physical details of campus life and the surrounding city possess an almost elegiac quality, perfectly suited to a narrative preoccupied with memory and intellectual inheritance. The setting itself becomes part of the book’s meditation on time: a university campus where past and present constantly overlap. For me, this setting worked well because it brought back vivid memories of my own undergraduate years at Brown.

The interview between the narrator and Thomas initially appears straightforward but gradually deteriorates into confusion and fragmentation. Uncertainty about Thomas’s mental state is central to the novella’s effect. Lerner deliberately leaves open whether Thomas is suffering from dementia, cognitive decline related to long covid, simple old age, or whether his apparently erratic thinking reflects the nonlinear habits of a brilliant but aging intellectual mind. Thomas’s inability to sustain a logical train of thought becomes unsettling precisely because he was once a celebrated scholar. The reader experiences the same discomfort as the narrator: the collapse of intellectual authority in real time.

The dead phone and fake recording device become crucial symbols. The narrator’s inability to record the interview forces him into unreliable transcription, memory, and improvisation. This directly connects to the novella’s title. “Transcription” refers not simply to the act of recording speech, but to the impossibility of ever perfectly capturing experience. Every act of remembering, writing, interviewing, or even listening becomes a distorted transcription rather than faithful preservation. Technology promises total documentation, yet the novel repeatedly demonstrates how fragile those systems actually are. The narrator pretends to possess technological mastery while secretly improvising around its failure.

The circumstances surrounding Thomas’s death remain unexplained because the novella is less concerned with biological causation than with the lingering aftereffects of presence. In many ways, Thomas is already disappearing during the first section through cognitive fragmentation. The memorial conference simply formalizes a vanishing process already well underway.

The final section, “Hotel Arbez,” contains the novella’s richest symbolic material. The real Hôtel Arbez Franco-Suisse famously straddles the border between France and Switzerland, with parts of the building literally existing in two nations simultaneously. This geographic instability mirrors the novella’s deeper concerns with thresholds and divided states: memory and forgetting, life and death, presence and absence, authenticity and fabrication. Thomas himself becomes a border figure after surviving covid. His near-death experience leaves him suspended between intellectual vitality and decline. Similarly, the narrator exists between truth and invention because of the fabricated recording. The hotel’s staircase crossing national borders suggests how impossible it may be to maintain clean separations between categories we once considered stable.

The novella resists simplistic condemnations of technology. Phones, recordings, and digital media certainly alienate people from one another, yet they also create strange new forms of consolation and survival. Max’s daughter’s eating disorder further extends the novel’s examination of mediation and embodiment. Her recovery through YouTube ASMR videos initially seems absurd or even comic, but Lerner treats it seriously as evidence that digital technologies are reshaping intimacy, comfort, and bodily regulation. The narrator’s separation from his own daughter because of his lost phone parallels Max’s daughter’s partial healing through online sensory experiences. Technology becomes both a problem and a provisional cure.

What makes the novella so compelling is precisely the unsettled feeling it leaves behind. Lerner refuses conventional narrative closure because the subjects he examines—memory, illness, mediation, inheritance—do not permit neat conclusions. Even the structure resembles a fractured transcript assembled from incomplete records and uncertain recollections.

For such a short work, “Transcription” engages an astonishing range of subjects: mentorship, intellectual legacy, the distortions of memory, the psychic aftereffects of the pandemic, family estrangement, and the increasingly unstable role technology plays in shaping consciousness itself. The novella’s obscurities are not failures of execution so much as expressions of its central insight: that modern experience increasingly feels partial, mediated, and difficult to fully comprehend even while we are living through it. The result is a work that rewards rereading. Its ambiguities linger because Lerner has constructed a novella less about delivering answers than about recreating the unsettling texture of contemporary thought and memory. show less

Transcription, Ben Lerner, author; Seth Numrich, narrator
The story evolves in three parts, involving different hotel locations. In the first hotel, when the story begins, our unnamed main character is traveling to Providence, Rhode Island, by train. It is during the Covid Pandemic. He is on his way to interview his former professor, his mentor Thomas, a man he once worked for as a research assistant, while he was in college. He typed up his notes. He promised his wife Mia and his daughter Eva, who has a serious eating disorder, that he would check in with them by phone after he arrived. However, after checking into the hotel, he accidentally dropped his phone into the sink. He can no longer record his interview with his mentor for the show more magazine, nor can he call his wife. Even though he has no recording device, he chooses to still go to the interview with Thomas. During the interview, he becomes aware of the fact that Thomas might be suffering from some degree of memory loss and confusion. His responses are a bit disjointed and unrelated to the questions posed. He inserts ideas that have no relevance, but expounds on them, apparently a character trait he has always had, but this time it feels a bit different. Thomas is revealing his own relationship with his father and also with his son Max. At one point, he seems to act like the interviewer might be his son Max. His memory returns to Germany. He recalls Hitler and the bombings from his childhood. The confusion is beginning to also affect the memories of the interviewer. He has had some mental lapses in his own past concerning his wife. Some of his memories interject themselves into his mind as they converse. His memories are also sparked in unusual ways as he walks on campus. It seems both the young man who is interviewing and the older man being interviewed each seem to be having memory issues.
In the second hotel, the narrative picks up at a memorial service for Thomas. Our narrator is criticized for his presentation there, since it was judged to be more of a confession by him, rather than an homage to Thomas. Apparently, he admits that the piece he wrote for his magazine was from his imperfect memory and was not actually the last accurate recorded thoughts of his mentor. His friends are shocked and disappointed. He must confess and explain it to Max. In the third hotel, the story moves on to Max and Adelle. Their daughter Emmie has an eating problem that is disrupting their lives. This child, Emmie, loves her grandfather Thomas. They were close, but Thomas and Max had not been as close. Father and son had a troubled relationship as Thomas sent Max to boarding school when Virginie, his wife and Max's mother took her own life. When Thomas gets Covid, his possible death became a formidable thought, and Max comes to realize that he loves his father, and believes his father loves him. Thomas had miraculously recovered from Covid, however, after being hospitalized, so what was the cause of his eventual death? He had joined the Hemlock Society. Were they involved? Did Thomas go to Switzerland with Max? Is suicide considered a dignified death? Is it ever an appropriate choice for anyone?
There were moments when the timeline confused me. I sometimes felt as if I was a voyeur or I was eavesdropping on anecdotal moments in people’s lives. The story seemed to question right and wrong choices and lifestyles. It examined loyalty and betrayal, reality and misperception. Sometimes it seemed to be disjointed or even filled with random thoughts, but I found common threads like the eating disorders, confessions, parent/child issues that were revealed with each character. I must admit, though, that although I enjoyed the writing, I am not sure I understood the story correctly. Nevertheless, I did enjoy it. To me, the story seems to be about choices. What makes a choice good or bad? What determines healthy practices vs unhealthy practices. Are the results the appropriate gauge? The novel is about romance and rejection, reaction and recovery, success and failure, honesty and deception, remorse and fulfillment, life and death.
This is an odd little book. There is so much information packed into so few pages. Sometimes, it feels disconnected and sometimes it seems to come together with a sleight of hand. The character who stars in the novel, whom I referred to as “the interviewer”, is never named, and I wondered throughout who he was. The men featured in the story have unique personalities and suffered trauma or difficulty in their youth. Two of the men featured have children with eating disorders, children whose development has suffered as a result. The men are given to some kind of confession, as the story evolves. They wonder if they are good parents. Although there are females in the story, they seem to have a more minor role. The two daughters who have the eating issues also seem ancillary. They do, however, all seem to serve to connect Max and the interviewer to Thomas.
Frailty will overcome us all, in the end. Thomas was in the present for the interview, but his mind took over as his memories wandered into the past. He knew he was losing “names and numbers”. Should we choose how we live and how we face the end in order to die with dignity, and if so, what does to die with dignity really mean? In this book, the characters seem to return to their memories of the past, to explain or justify their situation in the present, in order for them to face their coming future. Do we all use selective memories to do this? show less

Really good -- probably the best "contemporary fiction" I've read since Teju Cole's first novel. Short and compelling but intellectually quite sophisticated. Clever, even, if a bit humorless for my tastes. But brilliant in certain aspects.

https://donut-donut.dreamwidth.org/929308.html

This is another accomplished novel from Lerner. Even though this is a brief novel, there is a lot of skill in how the thoughts and themes weave in and around the actual story. He must live here because there are some passing Echo Park and Highland Park references. Having a nephew with ARFID and friends who have died from the Covid 19, the material here was easily "relatable". What actually happens is not so important as much as it provides an opportunity to talk about ideas, all kinds of ideas. A lot of these are about technology and how the iPhone and iPads has changed how we navigate our lives. It's also a book about aging and youth and being lost in the middle of it all. I think I would like to read this again at some point.

All my favorite things: an unreliable narrator, fallible memory, and competing versions of the story. Add some family drama, a lonely emotionally withdraw man, and a little meta textual commentary, and this might be my favorite book of the year. It reminds me of some of Philip Roth's best work.