Loop - by Brenda Lozano (Paperback)

About the Book

An "ideal notebook" records the Proustian, allusive wanderings of a young writer in Mexico City awaiting her lover's return.

Book Synopsis

Winner PEN Translates Award (UK)

Recovering from an unspecified accident, the narrator of Loop finds herself in waiting rooms of different kinds: airport departure lounges, doctors' surgeries, and above all at home, awaiting the return of her boyfriend, who has travelled to Spain following the death of his mother. Loop is a love story told from the perspective of a contemporary Penelope who, instead of weaving and unravelling her shroud, writes and erases her thoughts in her 'ideal' notebook. At once, funny and thought-provoking, her thoughts range from her stationery preferences to the different scales on which life is lived, while a cast of unlikely characters cross the page, from Proust to a mysterious dwarf, from a dreamy cat to David Bowie singing 'Wild is the Wind'. Written in an assured, irreverent style, Loop is the journal of an absence, one in which the most minute or whimsical observations open up universes. Combining aphoristic fragments with introspective narrative, and evoking Italo Calvino and Fernando Pessoa in its playfulness and wry humour, this original reflection on relationships, solitude and the purpose of writing offers a glimpse of contemporary life in Mexico City, while asking what it really means to find our place in the world.

Review Quotes

English PEN Translates Award

"A glorious tapestry of ideas." --The Guardian

"In this novel, the stream of consciousness is more like a whirlpool." --New York Times

"It should be read, period." --The Quietus

"A meditation on writing itself." --3: AM Magazine

"Absolutely marvelous from first to final sentence....an unmitigated delight." --Jeremy Garber, Powell's Bookshop

"A delightful meditation on waiting, love, and the inevitability of change." --Publishers Weekly

"Unforgettably marvelous from its very first sentence to its final one, Loop is a delighting, discursive, diary-like novel full of personality, humor, and profundity." --, Powell's Bookshop

"Lozano is a marvellous writer, bright, funny, subtly perverse, always moving." --Francisco Goldman, author of THE ART OF POLITICAL MURDER

"Lozano knows she is gifted, and has no shame in showing it." --Margarita García Robayo, author of FISH SOUP and HOLIDAY HEART

"An astonishingly successful notebook narrative that blends a solid plot with considered and funny musings on purpose and loneliness." --Books and Bao

"Experimental, witty and disruptive." --Splice

"Clever, innovative...an erudite observation of the everyday." --Translating Women

"A truly original reflection on love, relationships, solitude and the aesthetics and purpose of writing." --Elif the Reader

"Tremendous fun and an immensely rewarding read." --Jeremy Garber, Powell's Bookshop

"This is not a work that represents the irreducible violence of the place, solves loneliness, or is about death in every respect, but rather an attempt to live with these realities and still miss your boyfriend." --Air/Light Magazine

"Filled with many weird and wonderful curiosities." --Full Stop

"utterly charming and fun, philosophical and strange" --Loop

"Incredible...I loved every second of this book." --The Tartan

About the Author

Born in Mexico City in 1981, Brenda Lozano is a fiction writer, essayist and editor. She studied literature in Mexico and the United States. She edits the Chicago-based literary journal Make and is on the editorial board of Ugly Duckling Presse. In addition to Loop, she has published Todo nada (All or Nothing, 2009), Brujas (Witches, 2020), and Cómo piensan los árboles (How Trees Think, 2024) In 2015, she was recognised by the Hay Festival and the British Council as one of the leading Mexican authors under 40 years of age, and she was selected by the Hay Festival in 2017 as one of the Bogotá39, a list of the most outstanding new authors from Latin America.

Annie McDermott is the translator of a dozen books from Spanish and Portuguese, by such writers as Mario Levrero, Ariana Harwicz, Brenda Lozano, Fernanda Trías and Lídia Jorge. She was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán for her translation of Wars of the Interior by Joseph Zárate, and her translation of Brickmakers by Selva Almada was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. In 2024 her translation of Selva Almada's novel Not a River was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. She has previously lived in Mexico City and São Paulo, and is now based in Hastings in the UK.