Transcription

by Ben Lerner, Seth Numrich (Narrator)

From the “most talented writer of his generation” (The New York Times), a lightning flash of a novel that is at once a gripping emotional drama and a brilliant examination of the devices, digital and literary, we use to store―or to erase―our memories.

The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend, Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail “from the future and the past simultaneously” and who “reenchants the air” when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.

What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Haunted by Kafka (there are echoes of “The Judgement” and “A Hunger Artist”), but utterly contemporary, Lerner combines trenchant insight with lyric mystery. Ultimately, Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Audiobook, Book Club, Novels, American

4 pages, Audiobook

First published April 7, 2026

About the author

Ben Lerner is an American poet, novelist, and critic. He was awarded the Hayden Carruth prize for his cycle of fifty-two sonnets, The Lichtenberg Figures. In 2004, Library Journal named it one of the year's twelve best books of poetry. The Lichtenberg Figures appeared in a German translation in 2010, for which it received the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie" in 2011, making Lerner the first American to receive this honor.

Born and raised in Topeka, which figures in each of his books of poetry, Lerner is a 1997 graduate of Topeka High School where he was a standout in debate and forensics. At Brown University he earned a B.A. in Political Theory and an MFA in Poetry. He traveled on a Fulbright Scholarship to Madrid, Spain in 2003 where he wrote his second book, Angle of Yaw, which was published in 2006 and was subsequently named a finalist for the National Book Award, and was selected by Brian Foley as one of the "25 important books of poetry of the 00s (2000-2009)". Lerner's third full-length poetry collection, Mean Free Path, was published in 2010.

Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was published by Coffee House Press in August 2011. It was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and New York Magazine, among other periodicals. It won the Believer Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for "first fiction" and the New York Public Library's Young Lions prize.

In 2008 Lerner began editing poetry for Critical Quarterly, a British academic publication. He has taught at California College of the Arts, the University of Pittsburgh, and in 2010 joined the faculty of the MFA program at Brooklyn College.

Lerner's mother is the well-known psychologist Harriet Lerner.

Reviews

[Emily May · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t understand how you permit them. That she sat in my house, my granddaughter, a little Hungerkünstler, head bowed over her so-called tablet. That she cannot lift her eyes to mine. Even if the light is blue it is a black hole for the eyes. You know that I do not suffer from nostalgia. I am a partisan of the new, but only when it admits distance. Head bowed as if in prayer, this tiny creature. I do not criticize you. These are very powerful, yes, I barely escaped them. I am lucky to be, as you say, too late for them.

I am not really sure what to make of this. I enjoyed many of its components, but did it ever form a cohesive whole? Is it right for me to expect it to? I don’t even know how to summarise what it is about. Other reviewers have listed technology, memory, father-son dynamics, interview ethics and COVID among its themes and, yes, it is about all of the above. But it also doesn't fully lean into any of them, giving the impression it is about something larger whilst remaining reticent about what that is.

We begin with the narrator going to interview his mentor, 90-year-old Thomas. Shortly before, he drops his smartphone in the sink, breaking his only recording device. He arrives at Thomas's house and, for some reason, decides to conduct the interview anyway without telling Thomas that his phone is broken. What follows feels like three short stories linked by recurring themes of technology, memory and interconnectedness.

Some reviewers have compared it to Kitamura's Audition, but I don’t think quite as much is left abstract in Transcription, and I liked it better because I found the stories within it genuinely engaging— the father-son relationship, the struggles with a child who won’t eat, and the eventual submission to technology. It is, however, similar in that both authors leave some of the assigning of meaning to the reader.

I enjoyed the writing and the individual stories, but when I try to mentally bring them together into something thematically deeper and coherent, I'm left with the feeling that I'm doing all the hard work, inserting my own meaning into the gaps the author has left. Readers who enjoy that kind of philosophical exercise will probably like this.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 2 out of 5]

The novel goes like a reportage… And the reporter is an educated trashy being… And the language is generic and trashy… The story is opportunistic and written poorly… Vacuous stuff…
He is a thrall of the system… He is a slave to his smart phone…

Then I reached for my phone, which I’d set in the small steel tray attached to the mirror. I somehow knocked the phone into the water.
For the duration of this sentence, it was submerged. I tried to dry it with a towel but my screen was cracked in places and the liquid had seeped in; I watched it spread, like the solution across a rapid antigen test. The screen wouldn’t respond to my touch except to blur a little where I pressed it.

Without his phone he becomes deaf and dumb… He came to interview some nonagenarian… The talk is hollow and insipid… And then an old man’s son talks about an old man’s granddaughter… 
Some contemporary persons are just marionettes of environment and circumstance.

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay, now I see why everyone and their mother is obsessed with Lerner: This short novel about technology and memory presents itself as an experimental ghost story about father figures, and it has no business being so suspenseful, because hardly anything actually happens. "Transcription" is split in three parts, each named after a hotel that is central to its plot line - let's have a look at them all:

Hotel Providence in Providence, RI
The unnamed narrator visits his now 90-year-old mentor Thomas from Brown University (where Lerner studied as well) to do an interview with him - the old man is a fictionalised version of recently deceased renaissance man Alexander Kluge. The 45-year-old narrator is unable to grasp what the nonagenarian is hinting at when he says that he will soon travel to Switzerland. While he had planned to record the conversation with his phone, he accidentally breaks it before the appointment and doesn't have the heart to admit it to the old man, thus talking to him only pretending to record.
The star of this chapter and the book as a whole is the way Lerner crafts his dialogue: The ruminations of the old, highly educated German-born Thomas who loves to go on tangents and fights his failing memory, and how they are juxtaposed with the thoughts of the middle-aged former mentee, now himself a father, trying to re-evaluate the past from his new position in life. As this is Lerner, we of course have puzzle elements throughout the chapter: Hanns Eisler, Werner Schroeter, the Rue des Rennes bombing etc. pp.

Hotel Villa Real in Madrid
After Thomas' death, there's a symposium about his work at the Museo Reina Sofía, where the narrator reveals that he has reconstructed parts of the interview with him from memory, thus sparking a debate whether that's permissible. Interviews are almost always edited, but where does falsification start, when does a conversation turn into fiction, what can and can't technology record?

Hotel Arbez in La Cure, Switzerland
The final part is crafted as a dialogue between Thomas' son Max and the narrator. They have been friends since college, where Thomas became a father figure to the narrator as well - now they are both fathers, thinking about their roles, how Thomas fulfilled his role and what shaped all of them.

The bass line of Lerner's novel is a timeless meditation on family and what it means to be a father, but it is amplified by the role of technology, what it can reveal and capture, how it can swallow us and make us disappear, how it can connect and separate us (yup, there's a COVID angle in there). There is no didacticism in the text, but a lot of subtlety and complexity, also in the construction of the story.

Also, Lerner gives us one of the funniest author promos ever: In a recording mirroring the one done by the narrator, he talks about his novel for two minutes, describing the content intricately and in a way that I would fully subscribe to, but for people who haven't read the novel, his explanations are still more or less useless: It's impossible to summarize even parts of the story from what Lerner says, and I love how that promo functions as a smart paratext (you can listen to it here).

A very worthwhile read, let's see how it performs in the awards circuit.

You can now listen to the podcast crew discussing the German translation Transkription (let me just say: controversy!!) here: https://papierstaupodcast.de/podcast/...

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I listened to “Transcription” by Ben Lerner, beautifully narrated by Seth Numrich, and while the audio was excellent, I suspect this is a book better read than heard. Still, it held my attention enough that I listened twice.

This short, novella-like story follows an unnamed narrator interviewing his former mentor, a brilliant but elusive intellectual, and later the mentor’s son. What unfolds is less about plot and more about memory, family dynamics, and the tension between lived experience and recorded truth.

The most compelling sections explore a father/son relationship shaped by expectation and distance, along with a moving look at parenting a child with an eating disorder. Lerner also weaves in the anxiety and disconnection of the COVID era, adding another layer of emotional complexity.

At its core, this is a meditation on how we document our lives. Is memory enough, or do we now rely on recordings to validate what we’ve lived?

Thoughtful, layered, and quietly provocative…this one lingers.
Maybe next time, I’ll read it. 📖

[Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lerner can write, obviously, and he’s skilled enough that anything of his is readable and enjoyable at some level, but for much of Transcription I wasn’t convinced by the subject matter at all, it just felt like random things spliced together. An extended meditation on what it’s like when your phone breaks, some banal scraps about parenting, a bit of ‘hey, remember the pandemic?’, a story about a child’s eating disorder – all are written with finesse but this is thin stuff.

What then happens, though, is that it somehow all comes together quite miraculously at the end. Suddenly the themes synthesise and the different perspectives seem more interesting than they have thus far. So I’m caught between thinking Lerner has performed some distinct magic here to get this story to be more than the sum of its parts, and feeling that if a writer is talented they can make just about anything good.

In several ways, Lerner’s approach to his material in Transcription reminded me of Katie Kitamura’s Audition, and if you’ve read Audition, your response to it might provide a useful indicator of whether you will enjoy this. In both cases, I liked aspects of the books but also felt they were the weakest thing I’d read so far from their respective authors. If you’re new to Lerner, just start with Leaving the Atocha Station.

I received an advance review copy of Transcription from the publisher through Edelweiss.

[Flo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not sure if this is one novella or two short stories, but it was the best Ben Lerner experience yet. What I really like about him is that he is always connected to the present. Here, he writes about technology - how it helps us, makes us dependent on it, and can make our lives feel nonexistent when it can't offer proof of our stories. The tone is nuanced, non-didactic, and non-dystopian - exactly how good fiction should be.

[Henk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Erudite and focusing on the liminal space between public persona and private family relationships. Echoes of earlier turns of phrase and thoughts reverberate in the narrative, as do themes of suicide and self harm
But trust me, no matter how great it was to have him as a mentor, you don’t want a spirit medium as a father.

An interviewer is on his way to Thomas, in his 90s, and a titan within the arts and a veritable walking encyclopaedia. In three sections Ben Lerner takes the interview with Thomas and reflects on the ethics of recording and editing these exchanges with someone whose mental faculties are in decline and how his son perceives Thomas. This first section, called Hotel Providence for the university town Thomas lives, draws the reader into memories resurfacing and comments on our relationship with technology (with a iPhone getting wet forming an important plot point) and questionable ethics of our narrator in interviewing a 90 year old who clearly seems to struggle.
Meanwhile beneath the surface violence seems to simmer, exemplified in offhand sentences like: It was conventional undergraduate stuff, but then, so is suicide.

[Hotel Villa Real], the second part of the book centres around a visit to Madrid at a kind of conference at a museum (Reina Sofia) on the work of Thomas. This section feels a lot like a chapter in Parade by Rachel Cusk and starts addressing the ethics of interviews with someone whose faculties are waning.

Finally in Hotel Arbez (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel...) we have a granddaughter who refuses to eat from a very young age. Clearly there are some frustrations of having Thomas as a father. ASMR and laissez-faire techniques are used in facing the immense frustration and powerlessness of the parents.
Technology again forms a major part here, and forms an interesting, non-judgemental commentary on our inability to truly connect with each other, and especially those closest to us: But our proximity just produced the most intense forms of estrangement

The style and themes of Transcription are reminiscent to the works of Katie Kitamura, Rachel Cusk and Jesse Ball, in how non-linearity of narrative (echoing between themselves), vagueness of place (even though we Covid-19 plays an important role in the last part of the book and we have Eva, a ten year old singing along to Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero) and different takes on events rendered earlier are important.

I enjoyed this short novel and this is definitely a book to watch out for when it is published, I think many will enjoy the erudite take on our modern world and our relationship with each other under barrages of screen time, recordings and the mythologies we create.

Quotes:
I didn’t find it. I woke up.
But waking doesn’t end the dream.

Sanity often requires the disavowal of the senses.

[Nathan Shuherk · Rating 5 out of 5]

A pretty perfect book about the pandemic - the strange intimacy and inhumanity that washed over us, how our technology gave us life, but one different than the life before, and a lingering wistfulness for something, maybe anything, else. I love this book.

[Daniel Shindler · Rating 4 out of 5]

TRANSCRIPTION is a ghost story.It has a disembodied spectral quality centered on the pursuit of memories, hopes and goals. The quest is sifted through prisms of words, technology and visual images that shift the landscape of knowledge and connectivity.Set up in three sections spanning different time frames, the novel is driven by a technical malfunction in the first section which animates the rest of the interactions.Each section is dominated by a conversation that is driven by failures of intention, action or communication.

The first section involves a journey tinged with specters of the unnamed narrator’s past.He is traveling to Providence, site of his undergraduate education at Brown University. He intends to interview Thomas, a ninety year old intellectual who is both father of the narrator’s college friend Max and longtime mentor to the narrator.The memories of the college years float through the narrator’s head, recalling the sputtering uncertainties of youthful personal and academic entanglements. Possibly distracted by rumination, the narrator drops his phone in the hotel’s water filled sink, disabling the device. The accident sets up a failure of expectation, since Thomas has been adamant about recording the conversation. The narrator resolves this dilemma by dissembling and conducting the interview as if the phone were operating properly.

The interview is thus clouded by falsehood and misrepresentation.The nonagenarian’s rambling recollections and the guilt tinged thoughts of the mentee begin to develop a thematic strand of the novel.,The” false” interview underscores the relationship between humans and machines in communication and parsing information.The disabled cellphone is a reminder that there is an opportunity cost attached to technological gain that is paid through the erosion of direct human interaction.

An associated meditation concerns the meaning of fatherhood and mentorship and the ways in which technology both mediates and exacerbates these relationships. These themes are introduced in section one and reappear in sections two and three, which transition abruptly in different settings and time frames. This structure is similar to Kitamura’s AUDITION. Both novels introduce ideas that dangle throughout the narrative and seem to cohere at the novel’s end. I thought this structure worked less well in TRANSCRIPTION than it did in AUDITION because I had a greater sense of visual or theatrical aura surrounding Kitamura’s work. The reader must read closely in Lerner’s novel because there is no plot and the narrative is driven forward by three conversations .I came away from the novel filled with questions, seeking answers and feeling that I was chasing ghosts.3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ben Lerner’s intricate novella contains traces of John Berger’s short story “Woven, Sir” - later republished as “Madrid” alongside similar pieces. Although their perspectives diverge, like Berger, Lerner’s interested in the spectral, the interplay between past and present; liminal spaces; formative relationships with figures who’ve shaped values and creative practice, acquiring a near-mythological status for those they’ve inspired. But where, as Lerner’s noted, Berger’s prose is broadly “memoiristic,” Lerner’s alludes to his own life but withholds any promise of “fidelity to…lived experience.”

A cleverly-constructed triptych, at Transcription’s heart is Thomas, an old-school, European man of letters now in his nineties. In the opening section “Hotel Providence” set during the Covid years, an unnamed narrator travels to Thomas’s home in Rhode Island to formally interview him for a future magazine article. En route the narrator breaks his smartphone leaving him curiously unmoored, and without a means to record his upcoming meeting. But he decides to conceal this and proceed anyway. Thomas is erudite, expansive, gnomic yet somehow distracted, dislocated. In the middle section framed as an interlude or intervention, Thomas has died, the published interview has taken on a sacred cast. But, at a conference in Madrid, the narrator reveals he was working from memory without a transcript. A controversial confession in this age of obsessively mediated reality. In the final section, the narrator meets with Thomas’s son Max who recounts his final interactions with his father, conducted while Max was struggling with eight-year-old daughter Emmie’s ARFID diagnosis. A troubling condition which Thomas seemed unable/unwilling to process emotionally, instead retreating into the literary, likening Emmie to Kafka’s infamous hunger artist.

But, as you might expect if you’re already conversant with his fiction, Lerner’s isn’t a conventional linear narrative, it has a more recursive feel, looping back on itself, filled with time-shifted moments arising from a rush of memories. There are unsettling resemblances, characters like the narrator and Max, Emmi and the narrator’s daughter Eva are close to doppelgängers. Lerner repeatedly calls attention to artifice; highlighted in his use of naming, the string of characters linked through the letter “a” – from Arjun to Anisa; recalling too Lerner’s former alter ego Adam reinforced by the narrator having a daughter called Eva. Thomas is both absence and all-pervasive presence, his voice echoing across the narrative, even before he dies, he’s something of a revenant. Anxiety and influence are recurring themes. The narrator’s anxiety which has surfaced throughout his life, his anxiety around Eva’s avoidance of school. Max’s anxieties about this childhood and now about how that might impact being a father to Emmie.

Thomas as both Max’s parent and the narrator’s fatherly mentor brings up issues around father-son relations. Like the Hannah Höch pictures on display in Thomas’s house, Thomas himself is more collage than character. One who’s composed of writers significant to Lerner including those he’s famously interviewed particularly Rosmarie Waldrop – anecdotes from her life are attributed to Thomas – and Alexander Kluge with whom Lerner’s collaborated. This in turn foregrounds notions of the anxiety of influence. A concept that then morphs into thinking through processes of inheritance, experiences of parenting for both parent and child. Thomas’s own forebears are mostly buried or rigidly dismissed. Instead, he’s invested in reflecting on his contemporaries or those deemed intellectual equals. Although the ghost of Thomas’s wife, Max’s mother Virginie hovers in the background – her death by suicide, her name, references to stones, conjuring Virginia Woolf and the modernism which birthed Thomas.

There are meditations too on ideas of authenticity, oppositions like fact versus fiction, real versus fake. Traditional binaries Lerner, like Kluge, continues to explore and deconstruct, encapsulated by the uncanny, glass reproductions of flowers seen by the narrator in a museum, product of father-and-son team Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. The failure of the narrator’s phone forces a confrontation with the ‘real’, unfiltered by technology, making it that much harder to overlook its incongruities. Incongruity is another recurring theme: the unhoused sleeping rough across from the narrator’s upmarket Providence hotel; Emmie on the verge of starvation while surrounded by plenty; Thomas caught up in words while food is left out to rot and his everyday’s crumbling; the bizarre juxtaposition of literature and privileged intellectualism with a society and a planet marked by growing disorder and devastation. Just as technology is couched as a deferral or reconfiguring of the encounter with the actual, the life of the mind might be thought of as a project grounded in turning away from reality. For Thomas born in Germany, child of the Nazi era, for the narrator living in contemporary America was/is this a question of survival, a necessary antidote to impending chaos?

Lerner’s complex novella deliberately resists the possibility of being reduced to plot summaries or simple descriptions. It’s too densely interwoven for these, highlighting Lerner’s ideas about what fiction can achieve that mere reproduction, transcription can’t. However, there are jarring elements – would the narrator really not know what Dignitas stands for? Particularly raised in conjunction with Switzerland? There are lingering questions too particularly around gender. Why make Thomas more Kluge or Berger than Waldrop? It’s a choice that can’t fail to invoke the cliché of the great man of literature/ideas. Why make the primary explorations hinge on fathers and sons? Why are women seemingly assigned to the margins – lovers, wives, mothers. Or if not, as in Emmi and Eva, why do they bear the weight of things? Constructed as fragile, overtly emotional – not unlike the missing Virginie - Emmi and Eva lack true agency, their actions rooted in denial or refusal. It may be that these girls are meant to represent broader generational dilemmas and anxieties yet their portrayal seems so unthinkingly gendered, sometimes arrestingly conservative. For whatever reason, I found myself puzzling over their role here. Although, for me anyway, this works best approached as a puzzle. And, like a puzzle, I enjoyed the process of piecing it together, following the various strands threaded through the narrative. But once pieced together, I wasn’t convinced they yielded anything particularly illuminating or fresh. Ultimately, the parts were far more engaging than the whole.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Granta for an ARC

Rating: 3/3.5

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my first time reading Ben Lerner, revered post-postmodern writer, and from the sounds of it, this is probably the best book of his for a reader like me to start with.

It's reportedly much warmer than his other books, and it also has a major bonus of being short (around 130 pages).

A "reader like me" is a reader who doesn't get really excited by idea-based books. And this one is definitely that. Put very simplistically, the first part is about a nervy academic who is about to interview a major, 90 year old art figure. He drops his phone in the sink, the phone goes black. He feels enlivened without his phone, seeing everything in phantasmagoric glory as he walks to the 90 year old's house. He then, oddly, can't seem to fess up to his phone being broken, and lies to the guy and says he's going to record their conversation.

He gets kinda raked over the coals by his academic peers, when he tells them the story behind his interview. They think it means his interview wasn't accurate, and that he had betrayed the 90 year old.

Then the book turns to the 90 year old's son, whose daughter is refusing to eat, and how they eventually get her to eat, by watching insipid videos on her ipad. Then the son tells, in a one sided conversation, which is oddly punctuated with a few comments from the original narrator, about how he recorded his father, the 90 year old, without his permission.

One guy doesn't record but says he is, one guy records, but doesn't say he is.

Part of me is pretty impatient with this kind of "novel"... not a novel about real people, about characters who are alive and intriguing. This novel is a novel of ideas, ideas about recording, copying, recreating. Ideas about our reliance on technology to thrive, or perhaps the opposite, thriving in the absentia of technology.

Some of it is interesting, and I have heard glowing comparisons to Rachel Cusk and Katie Kitamura. I am going to be discussing the book with a group, so I'm looking forward to being schooled and growing my appreciation for something that didn't strike me as particularly new or revelatory, or delivered in a form that I could fall into the way I like to with fiction. It was entirely readable, to be sure, but I felt Ben Lerner the whole way through, the book a vehicle for his ideas. (I also thought about his mother, Harriet Lerner, who wrote those horrible self-help/psychological books, one of which The Dance of Anger I was forced to read during the nadir of my marriage, what a nightmare!)

Likely, just a matter of preference/taste, or a failing on my part! Ben Lerner lovers, don't pay any attention to me, keep on loving!

2.5 stars

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

“And say that as I stood in the dim, quiet room with Anisa—there were few other visitors that afternoon—I sensed that the tiny stems and styles and petals surrounding us were vibrating imperceptibly, or maybe just perceptibly, from our footsteps and voices, that the little wires in the models could register even our breath, but also that the specimens were trembling from the exhalations and voices and footsteps of all the people who had ever been in their presence, still vibrating, too, from the journey by boat from Europe (how could the fragile things have survived such a trip in their velvet-lined cases?), vibrating with the street life of Dresden outside the workshop where the father and son sat softening tiny tubes and rods in a jet of flame. The flowers were recording instruments of exquisite sensitivity; their glass anthers captured someone pouring a glass of water, the turning of a page.”

And here it is.

The delicate, shapeshifting, echolocating, ever sensing, data-gathering novel of technology in the 21st century.

“Transcription” is an enchantment, both in its simplicity and layers of understanding, in its acuity and puzzlement, in its depiction of how the world is now made of us and our devices.

In 130 miraculous pages, everything - fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, memory, memorabilia, fiction and facts, the world pre and post-COVID, affiliations, art, transmission, past and future selves - is viewed through the lens (or magnifying glass) of our iPhones and iPads.

Never before have I seen our technological devices portrayed so eloquently and precisely as Shakespearian characters in the play that is our little human life, at once soothing, (mis)guiding, teleporting, life-saving, incapacitating, numbing, elevating, alienating and community-building.

A dream catcher of a book, with one foot in the present and one foot in the past, obsessed with the fragility of lives lived onscreen and offline, both in our heads and in the physical world.

A glass flower of a book, surreal, unreal and very much real, “Transcription” is a recording instrument of exquisite sensitivity, attuned to all of our frequencies.

So many ghosts in this machine.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Unconscious inference: our brain guessing, making us hear what it thinks is likely there.”

Transcription is a meditation on the interplay between technology and memory. The short lyrical novel is divided into three parts. The first introduces a 45-year-old unnamed narrator traveling to Providence to interview iconic historian and filmmaker Thomas, his 90-year-old academic mentor at Brown. In the published interview, Thomas’ voice shifts between moments of insight and the meandering of encroaching senility.

“You were saying that your earliest memories involve the radio?’

“ The first experience of voice is disembodied, yes? Voices heard in utero: your mother’s voice, your father’s. The postman’s. Your sister singing…..

But what I am saying is that the radio is its recovery. Of the voice without the body. That, like everything new, it is also ancient. The truly new touches something before the merely recent. This I like about Freud— much I don’t like—that every discovery is rediscovery. Cinema recovers cave. This is Plato, too. Anamnesis. Because for all of us the first experience of language is voices traveling through the mother’s body.”


This interview was the final piece published by or about Thomas. Is it authentic? Before the interview, the narrator dropped his cellphone in the sink, disabling its recording device. For some unclear reason, he can’t admit this to Thomas, who believes the interview is being recorded. Were Thomas's final words his own or altered by the narrator’s memory?

This question becomes central in the novel’s second section. The narrator speaks at a memorial for Thomas and admits he didn’t record the final interview, much to the chagrin of the audience, which includes several speakers who have quoted from the narrator’s interview. Is this a valid concern? Is the narrator’s messy yet human reconstruction less true than a transcription from a device?

The third section is my favorite. It is told from the perspective of Thomas' son, Max, a long-time college friend of the narrator who is close to his age. This one-way monologue reveals an imperfect Thomas who struggled in his role as husband and father and Max’s own struggles as a parent. I won’t share more, but this section illuminates the entire text and further explores the significance of transcription.

[Ken]

Two compliments I can offer this book: one, it's not overwritten as so many contemporary novels are. It lands at 130 pp. and all occupants get off the craft safely. Two, it's less complicated than the only other Lerner novel I've read, The Topeka School (which I gave a decidedly mixed review to). And this one, too, gets a mixed review, though I liked it better than what was going down in Topeka.

This one comes in three parts, the second brief, the first and last longer. The first brings us to turf I'm familiar with, Providence, RI, where the protagonist is going to interview an old (as in nonagenarian) academic, only our hero drops his phone/recording device in water and it is not functional. Seems minor to admit as much, but to our man in Rhody it's a big deal and he fakes it. The interview doesn't go as well as it could.

The third part is the smoothest sailing of the three, but I admit here the content wasn't exactly my favorite. Now we're dealing with the son of the old academic, his wife, and their young daughter who won't eat much any food. Now we're dealing with fussy and fitful and argumentative parents trying to figure out the best course of action to put some meat on this kid's bones. Doctors. Therapists. Complications. Not to be unsympathetic, but anyone who's listened to first-time parents go on and on with "rules" of parenting (insert sound of helicopter blades) can tell you that it can get unpleasant at times.

The other minor hiccup is the fact that this Part III action is placed in the time of Covid first hitting. If I were a writer, I'd avoid the outbreak of Covid like the plague (see what I did there?). I've read multiple books that tackle this time period, and there's just something about it that never works. I can't place my finger on WHY, but it proves an unnecessary distraction over turf that a lot of us would rather not revisit. It's almost as if the time period resists ART.

In the end, a rather brisk and cleanly-written work of concision. And while I didn't love it, I felt it was a vast improvement over the last Lerner work. Maybe the reviews I read raised my expectations too high, I don't know. But, as the saying goes, no harm, no foul. It's not like you're trying to fight your way through a Henry James or James Joyce door-stopper.

[Jola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Transcription (2026) by Ben Lerner simultaneously attracted and annoyed me. The premise is intriguing: because of a drowned phone, a seemingly routine interview project spirals into a complex, psychological exploration of how technology, media, and memory distort the truth of our personal and shared histories.

As a side note, I was flabbergasted to see the name of my hometown, Lublin, mentioned on the very first page of the novel: “It upsets my stomach if I try to read while I’m looking the wrong way—or, as my ten-year-old, Eva, put it on a train to Lublin last summer, if I am ‘facing the past.’” Let’s face it, Lublin is not the most frequently referred-to place in Poland, so it was a beautiful surprise. It reappears once more in a slightly culinary context: “An unusual bourguignon because he learned to make it from Amalia, who was Polish, from Lublin—a woman who lived with us in Paris when I was a kid. So it was like a cross between beef bourguignon and bigos. I loved her.”

Reading some reviews, you might find it unexpected how many different themes readers manage to find in this book. For me, however, it is primarily a novel about human communication—specifically, how difficult, unreliable, relative, and deeply subjective it is. And I don’t just mean surface-level issues like a simple phone malfunction. Rather, it's about how technology makes it even more difficult to decipher what is actual reality and what is merely a transcription of it. Out of scattered shards of information—some of them flat-out false—we are forced to reconstruct our own image of the world.

It is a deeply confusing process, and Lerner deliberately places the reader in the exact same predicament. We are left to figure out on our own who the main characters of the various sections are and what kind of relationships bind them together. Enigmatic fragments of information are dropped without warning—like that mention of a train ride to Lublin—offering zero explanations. We will never know the circumstances surrounding the narrator’s travel to Poland with his daughter.

Despite these gripes, I was immediately smitten by Lerner’s writing—it is highly immersive, almost hypnotizing, and precise, drawing me in completely from page one. Even with its seemingly dry, report-like style, the novel is deeply emotional. However, its structure was a bit frustrating. Multiple narrative threads feel as if they’ve been forcibly pressed into a single framework, and it takes time to understand what connects them. Then again, I bet the reader's sense of confusion is entirely intentional.

This is an emotionally resonant novel that rewards close attention, even when its structure feels deliberately elusive. My lingering impression after closing the book is that a bolt of exquisite, high-quality fabric has been turned into an original and stunning, yet slightly lopsided dress—oddly tailored, but fascinating at the same time. Transcription has that exact mix where you are blown away by the craft and the sentence-level writing, but the structural frustration keeps it just a hair away from perfection. It's the kind of book that bugs you while you're reading it, but you just know you're going to be mulling over that oddly tailored dress for months.

[Maxwell]

I didn’t quite know what to expect going into this because I’d never read a book by Ben Lerner before, and from what I did know this one sounded a bit different than his other works. But I soon discovered that man can WRITE. Not only his sentence-level writing which is masterful, but the way he can manage to squeeze so much into only 144 pages is really quite something. A book about technology and our digital tethers, the way we are consciously and unconsciously influenced by media, the persistence of memory across time even in distorted forms, dynamic relationships between fathers and their children, and in many ways a look at how the COVID era has exacerbated all of these themes without it becoming a straight-up COVID novel. You could read this book again and again pulling on different threads and keep finding new things to ruminate on.

The book begins with a man–an unnamed male narrator–heading to the home of his former mentor, Thomas, a historian who has recently turned 90 years old. But before arriving at Thomas’ house, the narrator’s phone on which he planned to record the meeting for an article he is writing falls in the sink and becomes useless. The narrator goes on with the meeting, planning to use the evening to prepare for their longer session tomorrow, by which time he plans to have acquired a new phone with which to record. However, at their evening session the narrator begins to realize not all is as it seems or as he remembers, blurring the lines between truth and fiction, past and present.

We go on from there to a shorter chapter in the middle followed by a final lengthier section, each revealing new layers and facets to the realities of the narrator’s situation. Lerner uses these distinct parts to explore the themes mentioned above, but in such subtle and expert ways. The dialogue is flawless; it somehow feels controlled and specific without feeling lifeless. The way he moves seamlessly between timelines, memories, and conversations while still keeping the reader grounded in what’s happening ‘right now’ is really impressive.

I don’t know that I understood everything this book did, but I always enjoyed it. I even read the first 70 pages or so twice before completing the book, because I could tell there were so many layers to the book I didn’t want to miss by speeding through it. And I could probably go back and read the whole things again and uncover more! I can’t wait to talk to people about this one. If you were a fan of or at least appreciated any of these books (Audition by Katie Kitamura, Universality by Natasha Brown, Parade by Rachel Cusk), check it out. It comes out April 7, 2026. Thanks to the publisher for an early advanced copy for review!

[Katia N]

This is written in a good, easily digestible and sincere journalistic style. I guess Ben Lerner tried to provide some insights into new features of human life surrounded by screens, and especially - the smartphones as mind and hand 'extension' (or replacement in some cases). Also this is a Covid novel. However I've found it lacking in any new insights into these phenomena. And if there are any insights at all it is more into the mind of Ben-Lerner-alike educated millennial American man and his surroundings. I personally do not mind autofiction at all. In fact i like it when ‘well done’ as it delivers a direct window into someone’s real unique subjectivity different from mine. But this novel seems to be quite solipsistic even by the standards of the genre. And paradoxically, it is not that much of a subjectivity as it is zeitgeist.

Apart from the phones, i understood that the core of the novel was supposed to be a story of an elderly brilliant professor losing his memory. However, after a few poignant pages, even this story becomes the story of Ben Lerner. In the main episode, the old man kept confusing Ben Lerner with his son, Max. The novel is structured as a mirror when the narrative starts from the perspective of Ben Lerner and later this perspective is mirrored by the monologue by Max. Frankly, I totally sympathise with the old man's confusion: they speak alike, they act alike and they think totally alike! It was partly the intention, I believe; but there is something quite ironic in this daunting similarity; and I am not sure the irony was the point here. If it was, kudos to Lerner. But the text comes across as too earnest for that.

The old man is depicted very poignantly when he has got a chance to appear, but unfortunately yet again very quickly it turns back to Ben Lerner and/or Max (who is practically his doppelganger) and their problems (including the memories of their student crushes and mental-health episodes that happened twenty years ago, fortunately, without visible affect on their current daily lives).

Also my personal pet-peeve is how this typical educated, millennial man talks (and presumably thinks and feels). He is 'normalising' anxiety to his child instead of just saying that everyone feels this way sometimes. He 'rescues' a dog from a shelter as if it is some kind of an act of heroism instead of just using something less full of pathos and more human for a verb. He calls his wife 'partner' and goes through regular rounds of 'couple therapy' without seemingly good reason. So the whole novel reads a bit like a confession to his shrink made in ‘a performative’ language.

I’ve just finished the book. So these are my initial impressions. It was quite quick and relatively pleasurable read. In fact i’ve found it almost addictive until i’ve stopped reading the last page. However, i am not sure it it was a ‘healthy snack’ or something lower on the spectrum of vital nutrition. Maybe I am a little unfair. But it is what it is for now. Maybe this novel would age well both in my consciousness and in history. And after some time, it would appear more insightful for people who somehow missed living through the last decade.

To finish on a positive note, there was one ‘insight’ into a way of looking that made me pose:

I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck–rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed. And I carried this new way of looking, or this new hinge in my looking, outside the museum: when my sister dragged me camping, for instance, I was typically unmoved by “unspoiled” mountain views; after the glass flowers, I would see cracks in the rock face as penciled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful. I could will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touches or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural; and so on. It was with Anisa that I first became conscious of this quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child’s game, a CBT exercise, and a religion. Eventually I’d call this “fiction.”

I hope his next book would be more akin this fiction.

[Meliksah Altuntas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Günümüz teknolojileri ile bellek arasındaki ilişkinin gerçeklikle olan bağıntısını ilk bölümde komik, ikinci bölümde ise insanın ufaktan sinirlerini bozan bir tartışmayla taçlandıran bu harika roman, belleğin yeniden şekillendirilmesi meselesine dair çok çarpıcı cümleler kuruyor.

Ailevi açmazların günümüzün etik değerleriyle yeniden inşasını, farklı jenerasyonlardan ebeveyn pratikleri ile gözden geçirdiği üçüncü bölüm ise hem biyolojik hem seçilmiş ailelerin kendine özgü çelişkilerini harika harmanlıyor.

Ben Lerner’ın diyalogları ve yaşları epey değişken karakterlerini nüvesine uygun konuşturabilme gücü hayranlık uyandırıcı. Romanın meselesine ayrı, ele alınıp söze dökülme şekline ayrı bayıldım. Başlarda yer yer gülerken üçüncü bölümde sürpriz gözyaşlarıyla beni beklemediğim yerlerden yakaladı.

[Tania · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are lots of reasons I might give a book a high rating: gorgeous prose, a strong emotional impact, a great story, or simply making me think. Transcription is beautifully written, and it definitely made me think.

The problem is that I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. To me, the three conversations felt like an exploration of whether technology enhances or diminishes our experiences and memories. But honestly, I'm not sure if that's what Lerner was aiming for.

I wanted a little more guidance from the author. I don't need everything spelled out for me, but I was left feeling a bit lost. Because of this, I don't think this is a book that will stay with me for very long.

So, 3 stars it is.

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slight novel in which the second and third sections transform what you had thought of the previous section(s), exploring themes of representation, lying, fiction, dream, cognitive decline confabulation, creative association, art's ability to renew or refresh the world, all the while seeming absolutely modern -- or at least early this decade, especially the last section that devolves into a pandemic story. I say "devolve" because I have some fatigue for the sort of story cropping up in novels lately. It's so close to home and so recent and so common that my eyes almost refuse to retain the sentences as I read them. The experience described in the dialogue with Max toward the end was really similar to what went down with my own father that first spring of the pandemic, processing and preparing for his death from covid, only for him not to die just then. Also quite close to home was everything with the daughter and her tablet, the role of technology in some larger pathology, in the book's case eating issues, in my daughter's case autism/ADHD. But "relating" to the text isn't why I liked it -- more so, it activated magic-eye co-creation imaginative capabilities on page 27 describing Thomas's speech like a child "dispersing the seeds of a dandelion after having made a wish" or "like the cave artists of Patagonia" who blew pigment from their mouths creating a halo effect around hands held to the walls of a cave. From then on I was in it to win it, very much appreciating Thomas's free-associative expression, the spontaneous poetics of his conversation. And the next section in Madrid, a lively dinner, before revelation of the turn in the narrative. And then the final section, some disorientation until it's clear that Max (son of Thomas) is the narrator, speaking to the narrator of the previous sections. I doubt I'll do it but it would make sense to re-read in reverse order, with the third section (the original text in a way) read first, followed by the accusation in Spain, followed by the opening, which is the text the narrator read in Spain to commemorate Thomas, a blend of memory and what Max had told him, having no transcription. And then all throughout there's the suggested "ghost voice" of the author's actual life during the pandemic that can be read between the lines. FWIW after finishing this I pulled Lerner's The Topeka School off the shelf and intend to read it next after starting it and putting it down soon after publication. Figured I might as well secure completist status.

[Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a world where our devices seem to run interference with our being in the world, with our connections to others. How we now live and see the world as filtered through our devices. We even see family death through our device, just as we’ve just seen the Gazan genocide online. How does this affect us? Are we just another device ourselves and can turn ourselves off like we do the devices?

Transcription is the work of a poet who puts us in the space between. The place between our private lives and our public lives especially if we are ‘famous’. The place between the ‘good use’ of our devices and becoming addicted to them. The place between being independent human beings with our own agency and being an addendum to our devices in a place where we cannot function without them. With his spotlight on our children, Lerner explores how these in between spaces can affect them as well. How we’ve made our devices part of their being as well and the possible results.

An ARC kindly provided by author/publisher via Netgalley.

[Sam Quixote · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you ever see a book marketing itself with the phrase “a meditation on…” then drop that book immediately because it will almost certainly be a total waste of your time. Unfortunately for me I didn’t notice that the copy on the inside jacket called this book “a brilliant meditation on…” until after I’d read the book but my theory checks out as Transcription by Ben Lerner is not good.

The book is divided into three sections: in the first, a writer visits his elderly mentor for what will probably be the mentor’s final interview. Before beginning, the writer drops his phone - which he was going to use to record their interview - into a sink, breaking it, and instead of cancelling the interview or explaining himself, he decides to proceed with the interview, pretending his phone still works, and then afterwards reconstructs from memory his mentor’s words.

The second section reveals that others have found out that the writer falsified quotes from his interview with the mentor and the people who liked him are upset with the writer for this. The third and final section is the mentor’s son talking to the writer about, mainly, his daughter’s eating disorder, and partially about his relationship with his father.

And this is why I think books describing themselves as “meditations” are bullshit as there’s nothing else to say about them. Transcription doesn’t know what it’s about. It says something about how dependent we are now on phones, which is an absolutely banal point. Yes, it’s bad that everyone’s addicted to their phones, but there’s a moment in the third section where a phone provides the most moving scene in the book so phones are also… goooood? (albeit this was a basic phone and not the mini computers that the majority of us use - so basic phones = good, smartphones = bad?)

I get the general concept of what Lerner’s attempting about the fragility of memory, unreliable narrators, and how everyone’s perceptions are different. We don’t know what’s real about any of the sections, whether the writer in the first section is making it all up based on his conversation with his mentor’s son in the third section, or vice versa, because elements of both stories appear in both sections. The book cover (to this edition anyway) looks like a recording device and different people reading this book will come away with different perceptions of what they’ve read - meta! I get that Lerner’s vaguely trying to say something about the nature of reality, what’s real and what’s in our heads are two different things, etc.

I just don’t find what he’s doing in this book at all convincing, clear or enlightening. Parts of the book are frustratingly contrived - why is the writer in the first section so unprepared for an interview, bringing only his phone to record, and so unable to articulate his mistake to his mentor, or even attempt postponing the interview until the next day?? Other parts feel annoyingly unclear on when they’re happening - are the sections happening in sequence? - with the third section in particular feeling meandering and largely pointless.

Much of the story is underdeveloped - although I thought it was kinda funny that we never even find out what the mentor did for a living, as in what was he mentoring people on? - so that we never understand the stakes of what the writer did or why any of it matters. Some people thought poorly of him for bungling his account of his mentor’s final words - so what?

There is a moving scene in the third section when the son thinks his father’s dying of Covid and tells him what he thinks in one garbled, but realistic, speech, and the aftermath of that moment. And, while feeling disjointed, it was mildly interesting to read about the daughter’s eating disorder (social media helped with that - nuance! Gawd amighty).

I didn’t enjoy reading most of Transcription. I don’t think Ben Lerner is a good storyteller or writer, or an especially good artist. What I believe he was trying to convey - a clumsy and weak commentary on technology’s ubiquity in modern life, and the complexities of its benefit/detriment to society, as well as something on the use of language - was shallow and ineffectively portrayed in an unmemorable and often baffling narrative.

So of course it won a literary award - you know, those things that some judges, who have such poor literary taste, award writers who use AI (like Jamir Nazir’s story "The Serpent in the Grove" for this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize). I recommend that potential readers meditate on something other than Transcription.

[Book Riot Community]

Book Riot’s Best Books of 2026 (So Far)

A journalist drops his phone in the hotel sink minutes before he’s supposed to meet with his aging mentor to conduct what will be the last interview of his life. He forges on with the conversation despite having no way to record it, and what he produces raises the kinds of questions and controversies that are Ben Lerner’s calling cards. Not much happens, but the book is kind of about everything: art, memory, family, anxiety, parenting, and the mysterious space between events and the meaning we make of them. Lerner is one of our most interesting living American writers, and this slim, compelling novel is no exception.

- Rebecca Joines Schinsky

[Alan (The Lone Librarian) Teder · Rating 3 out of 5]

July 30, 2026 Update Here is some fun 🤣! Canadian author Anakana Schofield admits to mementoizing* in her reading of Transcription. From a Toronto Star July 25, 2026 Interview:

Who's the one author or what's the one book you'll never understand, despite the praise?
The list is long and I have sufficient enemies. I will say, I struggled to get through the first section of Ben Lerner's novel "Transcription." In the end, I read the parts in reverse to endeavour to understand the hype. Read backward or in reverse, it improved. I never would have gotten there without my topsy-turvy approach.

Faking an Interview to Eating Disorder
A review of the McClelland & Stewart hardcover edition (April 7, 2026) released simultaneously with the eBook/audiobook.

This seemed like very thin material from which to draw conclusions, and yet people manage to do it with many 4 and 5 star ratings. But there are also the 1-star 'the Emperor has no clothes' ratings as well. I land in the middle and that was because i bumped up a likely 2-star to a 3-star when in the top of the 9th inning a short passage related to ASMR was used. As I am an actual experiencer of the soothing tingling sensation caused by various gentle nature sounds and/or the artificial ones created by ASMRtists on YouTube, the use of ASMR in Fiction will always earn my blessing.

Otherwise, I felt compelled to invent the Write Your Own Meaning Alert™ for this, to accompany various earlier tags such as the Write Your Own Ending Alert™ and the Unsatisfactory Ending Alert™ and the Mementoized Fiction Alert™.

Briefly, an unnamed narrator goes to interview his 90-year-old mentor who is in cognitive decline. The mentor is soon to travel to Switzerland for an assisted death procedure and in a throwaway aside the narrator refers to his own attempted suicide in his early life. But the narrator's phone is not working so he is unable to do any recording. He writes the interview up from memory regardless. Later he admits this to fellow delegates at a posthumous academic gathering in the mentor's honour and is admonished for it by the other attendees. In the final section the narrator listens to the mentor's son (a friend from university days) tell the story of his daughter's eating disorder, which was eventually cured. OK, now decide your interpretation of the meaning.

Trivia and Link
Shockingly, Transcription won the 2026 Orwell* Prize for Political Fiction which even managed to surprise the author.
* The Orwell Foundation website seems to have gone down in recent days (mid-July 2026 as I write this), but I happened to screenshot the prize announcement before that. See the image below or at this link.


Footnote
* Mementoize is an invented word as follows:

mementoize
məˈmenˌtōˈīz/
verb / neologism
Definitions:
• 1. to tell a story in reverse order, as in the film Memento (2000) by director Christopher Nolan.
“Christopher Nolan didn’t invent reverse chronology story telling, but his film title Memento is the easiest to make into a verb: mementoize."
• 2. to read a book in reverse order to finish it, especially when reading it in forward order is not very interesting or compelling.
“The book was so dull I had to mementoize it in order to get through it."
• 3. a fictitious word invented for use in book reviews by The Lone Librarian™.

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

A story in three parts about fathers, mentors, memory, resentment, and smartphones. It is hard to write about any of it, because going without expectation from part to part and page to page is much of the joy of the book. It winds and winds, often through long monologues where our narrator often struggles to even get a word in edgewise.

So here is what I will tell you right now and you don't need to read further if you haven't read this book: it is quite short and will greatly reward being read in a single day; it is not an acrobatic work of structure, and yet it has many of the same impacts as a book like Asymmetry or Trust Exercise; the very beginning has perhaps the best writing I have ever seen about smartphones and all they have done to and for us; and it's the kind of book you could go back and reread immediately upon finishing.

I made the mistake of taking a break in the middle of this book, thinking that the whole thing would be like this one long monologue and I needed to bring my most attentive brain, only for the monologue to end like two pages later and the whole book to change. So definitely do not do that.

Mostly I just loved how this book washed over me. I am finding it hard to write about. The first section gave me so much anxiety, first with the smartphone (brilliant stuff, felt incredibly targeted) and then as our narrator goes into the interview with a man who clearly isn't exactly aware of what is happening or who he is, and yet continues anyway. He seems more affected by being back in this college town, thinking of how his now wife left him in college for another man. His anxiety for his daughter, which then seems to layer on top of the anxiety Max feels for his daughter in the third section. Slowly realizing who Max is in the first section and how Thomas mistakes the narrator for him, only to bring those conversations back in the third section as we finally realize what it was Thomas was talking about.

There is a lot here about the power of a mentor and the powerlessness of a father. That a man can be in the professional world, the artistic world, and guide people through, turn them into adults. But a man faced with his own child can do almost nothing to soothe and comfort in a world full of screens and anxieties. But that this same man also had no one to soothe and comfort him before those screens existed. And through it all we can argue about whether or not we went to Switzerland twenty years ago, and it's not clear whether we are even having the same conversation. The way people miss each other, the way we misunderstand.

It isn't the kind of novel where there is a nice tidy thesis. Instead it is more like walking into an ocean and letting it all wash over you. In a way, only that small second section is tidy, it's concrete and simple, and even that creates this sense of misunderstanding and moral uncertainty that continues to creep over into the third section. The third, the strangest since we don't really know where we are and what is happening and why this conversation is even taking place, but also the one thing that strings everything back together while also opening it all up even wider. It opens, it closes, it folds, it moves.

A fantastic novel.

[Rob Baker · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5 Stars

Short Review: Intelligent writing and keen observations elevate an otherwise mostly tedious exercise in form and superficial social commentary.


Additional Thoughts that May Include Spoilers

Although Transcription is officially divided into three sections (each named after a hotel), it really breaks down into four parts:

“Hotel Villa Providence”:
–a prelude/slice-of-life scene
-a rambling monologue

“[Hotel Villa Real]”: an interlude/slice of life scene

“Hotel Arbez”: a second rambling monologue

The slice of life sections were the most interesting to read, and perhaps it’s not coincidental that they were more like traditional stories, with dialogue, setting, description, etc. Although the monologues also had their thought-provoking, moving moments, I would not want to listen to someone babble on like that in real life, and reading them was equally tedious.

The first half of the second monologue, where a father first discusses his daughter’s disturbing eating disorder, is the most engaging of the two, explaining the progress of her “disease” and its effects on the speaker and his wife. Themes that are briefly touched on in the other sections – the effects of modern technology and concerns about climate change, for example–also make appearances here.

This monologue’s second half tells a COVID-era story about the speaker’s father, which, though again partly moving (it’s hard to read a life-and-death anecdote and not feel some emotional engagement), mostly feels dry and dated, saying nothing new on a topic that at this point feels as relevant as Y2K.

Overall the book has a very grim mood, a dim world view, and is populated by characters who are angry, anxious, over-analyzed, and self-absorbed. I would not want to spend one minute in real life with any of them.

The blurbs on the dust flaps of my copy all talk about what a great writer Lerner is [“one of the most acclaimed writers in the English-speaking world”.....his writing “shatters time, space, and literary borders”.....he is a “supremely gifted prose stylist”] but none of them comment on the book’s quality. Now having read it, I can see why. They wanted to be honest. Lerner is a very skilled writer. This book is not the best use of his talents.

[Joachim Stoop · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vandaag in Humo mijn recensie:

Het -nochtans dunne- drieluik Transcriptie samenvatten is als het Belgische parlementair stelsel uitleggen aan een Chinees in het Duits. Een poging: onderweg naar de hoogbejaarde Thomas, een grootheid binnen de kunstwereld en een wandelende encyclopedie, vernielt een interviewer zijn iPhone per ongeluk en heeft geen ander middel om het gesprek op te nemen. In plaats van Thomas hiervan op de hoogte te stellen, zwijgt hij er uit schaamte over. Verre van een klassiek interview wordt het een meanderend, droomachtig gesprek over geheugen, de aard van fictie, kunst, mentorschap en de grenzen tussen individuen -onderwerpen die telkens meer uitdoven dan verhelderen. Hoewel Thomas zijn kennis als een orakel etaleert, betrekt hij alles op zichzelf en klinkt hij bij momenten erg verward. In het tweede deel onthult de interviewer tijdens een kunstconferentie rond de inmiddels overleden Thomas dat hun laatste conversatie een gebrekkige reconstructie was in plaats van een werkelijke neerslag. In het derde, aangrijpendste deel staat Thomas' kleindochter centraal: een meisje dat al van jongs af aan weigert te eten.

Bij het lezen van Transcriptie blijkt de poel waarin je je eerste stap zet verrassend diep én er schuilt voortdurend iets onder de oppervlakte. Het is een vreemdsoortige aftasting van ouderschap en verhalen vertellen, van verbondenheid en het onvermogen om werkelijk contact te maken -in het bijzonder met degenen die ons het meest nabij zijn- waarbij moderne technologie dat gemis alleen maar verdiept.

Een opsomming van thema's gaat echter voorbij aan de unieke kracht van de 47-jarige Amerikaan: zijn natuurgetrouwe, vrije en toch spaarzame proza, zijn knipogen naar Kafka, zijn intrigerende en complexe personages, zijn uitmuntend geconstrueerde dialogen. Reken er maar op dat je bij herlezing andere inzichten krijgt -als origami die je op verschillende manieren kunt ontvouwen. Ben Lerner staat al sinds zijn romandebuut Vertrek van station Atocha (2012) als megatalent geboekstaafd en Transcriptie bevestigt dat volmondig, al wekt hij ook een dorst op die hij zelf niet helemaal lest en die doet snakken naar zijn volgend boek.

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two brief and playful narratives joined by a short linking section. The structure allows Lerner to layer up his themes (this is one of those books where the author says, ‘Pay attention, everyone: I have a Theme’) and revisit the same beats in different ways and from different directions: the mediation of devices, how they remember things for us, how they get in the way while also sometimes connecting, how things can be changed or lost when they move from one medium to another. It's very sparse and dialogue-heavy, to the extent that there isn't really much ‘prose’ at all, it's all just different kinds of inhabited first-person speechifying, inviting us to ponder the borderlands between real and reproduction, fact and fiction.

“But waking does not end a dream. I am sorry to be firm. This is an error in dream interpretation; this is an error we Westerners make. … We extend the dream when we share it. You call it fiction, but it is more.”

My question is, is it really enough to mention the same idea a few different times and then claim that you've explored it, or said anything interesting about it? In the first section we have someone who thinks he's being recorded but isn't; in the final section, the same person is being recorded but thinks he isn't. This kind of programmatic parallelism – which Transcription is built on – is clever and satisfying, but I'm not sure we're actually getting anywhere. I enjoyed the articulacy here, and found it perfectly engaging while I was reading it, but I can't help feeling that it's all a bit insubstantial.

[Joy D · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book. My summary will not do it justice, but here goes. Our narrator is on his way to interview his former mentor, Thomas, now 90. Thomas is preeminent in the arts and is also the father of his college friend Max. He lives in seclusion and has suffered mental decline. Before leaving his hotel room, the narrator accidentally drops his phone in the sink and cannot record the upcoming interview. Unwilling to admit the mistake, he pretends he is recording it.

The novel is structured in three parts set at different hotels. At Hotel Providence, the narrator prepares for the interview. At Hotel Villa Real, he gives a talk about the interview and receives unexpected criticism. At Hotel Arbez, he meets with Max, and we learn about Max's relationship with his father, his experience during COVID, and his daughter's eating disorder. The book investigates the gaps between what happened, what was remembered, and what was documented.

One of the main topics is how technology gets us both closer to and further from objective reality, which seems especially relevant today, when we rely so heavily on our many devices. I felt immersed inside the minds of both the author and his characters. The final chapter reordered everything I thought I had understood.

I almost never re-read books but I’m already planning to re-read this one. It’s brilliant! And short, so if you’re on the fence, give it a try. I expect this book will be nominated for literary prizes. Highly recommended to readers who enjoy adventurous and creative literature.

[Korcan Derinsu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Transkripsiyon, Ben Lerner'in en sevdiğim romanı oldu. Hafızanın nasıl çalıştığına, geçmişin nasıl sürekli yeniden kurulduğuna ve kurgu ile hakikat arasındaki sınırın aslında ne kadar geçirgen olduğunu anlatıyor Lerner. Üçüncü bölümde değişen anlatıcı tercihi de boşlukları doldurma (ya da yeni boşluklar yaratma) adına çok zekice.

Lerner'ı uzun zamandır takip etsem de onu hiçbir zaman "benim yazarım" olarak görmüyordum ama bu romanla fikrim değişti gibi. Hatta tüm külliyatına tekrar dalsam mı diye düşünüyorum şu an.