Ben Lerner - Transcription (Granta, 2026) ***

The book's title refers to the recording of an interview, and its transcription for a magazine. The interview is being recorded by the anonymous narrator. Thomas, the interviewee is his German ninety-year old mentor and polymath. Prior to the interview, the narrator drops his phone in the sink, so now he cannot record the interview, yet he tells the interviewee that is being recorded. It's bizarre that his phone is broken, it's bizarre that this should prevent him from interviewing even.

In the second part of the book, we are in Madrid, where the narrator has to confess to some of his colleagues and friends that he reconstructed the interview from memory, which is received by them as being unethical and they accuse him of being dishonest. Again, how bizarre is this? How many interviews have been done without recording devices? Nobody ever accused the journalist or interviewer of dishonesty.

In the third part of the book, he meets Max, a friend and the son of Thomas, and they discuss disease and the eating disorder of the narrator's daughter. As a patient advocate, I especially liked this paragraph on how the medical world looked on his daughter's condition. 

''Needless to say we sought advice. (...) The advice was: back off, no child ever starves herself to death. The advice was: intervene immediately, get her on growth hormones, these are crucial years. The advice was: if she wants junk food, let her have it: go to McDonald's twice a day. The advice was: you must form healthy lifelong habits now, avoid the hormones and chemicals in junk, that's more important than her weight. The advice was: she's a happy kid, don't make things bigger than it is, no therapy, do not pathologize. The advice was: this must be displaced anxiety or trauma, she must be suf­fering, something must have happened at school, get her in therapy now. We had no sense of what she might be 'express­ing,' if anything, with her eating or not eating; we asked Emmie every imaginable question, but asking questions seemed to make it worse, more pressure. And I can't emphasize this enough: she was a smart, social, generally happy kid who played all day, slept well, had only the normal sea­sonal illnesses. And while she was always a bit smaller than the other kids, you wouldn't have thought: There is some­thing wrong with this girl" (p. 82)

"Transcription" is well written, multi-layered and critical of modern technology. At the same time, I find the behaviour of some characters a little too programmatic, too much puppets in the author's agenda. Mixed feelings after reading it.