Transcription

by Ben Lerner

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, Literature, American, 21st Century

144 pages, Hardcover

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

[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/...

[Vit Babenco · Rating 3 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.

[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.

[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. 📖

[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.

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[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!

[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.

[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.

[Sophie Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

cried lol

[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.

[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.

[Kate O'Shea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Transcription is divided into three parts.

In Hotel Providence a writer returns to his college town to conduct a final interview with his ailing and aged mentor, Thomas. But having dropped his phone into the washbasin he finds himself in the dilemma of not being able to record the interview but not wanting to let Thomas down.

In Hotel Villa Real we see the young writer being lauded for the triumphant interview but will he come clean?

Finally, in what I found the most moving section we meet Thomas' son, Max, and his family who are dealing with their own troubles with their daughter and, latterly, Thomas health at the time of Covid. This final part is a thoughtful look at the relationships between father and child when health is the all consuming issue.

Ben Lerner has written another wonderful short novel that deals with relationships between fathers, children and those we influence throughout a career. The prose is perfect, the characters are interesting and complex.

I really need to read more of Lerner's work.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Farrar,Strauss and Giroux for the digital review copy.

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv)]

so, i was wrong...
---
the cover looks vaguely like Universality, which was my favourite read of 2024, so that means this could be my favourite of 2025, right?

[Iryna Chernyshova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Непогано, але занадто коротко. Тема covid морально застаріла і читати це зараз, як мінімум, дивно. В час диких швидкостей при постійному житті в божевільному світі ми потребуємо вже чогось іншого.

Взагалі твір виглядає як раптова бульбашка на воді після дощу. Хочеться спитати - і шо.

[Matthew Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

In essence, Transcription is two short stories/novellas that inform each other. The book is split into three parts: the first two are directly related and the third's place ultimately becomes clear but at first seems unconnected. A writer (possibly Lerner himself, as we still live in the post-Knausgaard literary world of autofiction) on the morning of his interview with his nonagenarian mentor, drops his mobile phone in the hotel sink, thus destroying his means of recording their conversation. Too embarrassed/ashamed? to admit what has happened, he instead pretends everything is in order and the recording is happening. The result is a kind of fictional version of their conversation. A fiction within a fiction. The final part switches up and, in monologue form, has a speaker talking to the narrator (as we eventually find out) about their child's eating disorder. The theme of technology and its role in our lives isn't missing for long, and returns in the context of parenting and childhood.

There is a description of the speaker's child watching AMSR unboxing videos online ('the clips are full of the sounds of plastic wrap crinkling, paper rustling, and the gasps of infantile gurgles of excitement from the unboxer, who taps on everything with her long pink nails'), which causes a reflection on those sorts of videos, especially since their child refers to them as ''satisfying'',

'I would never have described anything as satisfying at that age. And she seems to mean the satisfaction of a kind of physical need: while she was watching a flattened image on a screen, all those mouth sounds and little taps and crinkles provoked a low-level somatic response, scratched a kind of itch. It's like the device takes you out of the real world, shields you from all the pressures and information, but then it administers this series of subtle sensory inputs and muffled shocks, these mild effects, as compensation for the unmanageable reality it's made disappear. Which really is like pornography, maybe just is pornography, reducing all the complexity and messiness of an intimate encounter and offering a safer, addictive, milder, repeatable version of satisfaction in its stead?'

I read the first half of this right before going to the pub to have some drinks with a new-ish friend. There is no signal in the city where I live; so when I'm out, I have no way of contacting my girlfriend to give her updates about my whereabouts, how safe I am. More than ever I caught myself looking at my phone, in the moments when my friend was at the bar or in the toilet, only to see the ‘no signal’ symbol, before pocketing it uselessly again.

[Saba Houmani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another guaranteed Ben Lerner slam dunk 🫨🤯🫥

Reading some other reviews and let me say: no, you don’t get it, only I do.

On the same morning it was released, I tried to explain the book to my grade 10 students (who know zero lore), all the interconnections and why all the decisions make sense and how they’re all carefully building up to something. And the revisions between the preview and the release. And I showed them the last few sentences and the quote that finishes the book. And they’re like girl ok anyway so

[victoria marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyChart alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past, because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless.

*

It is unlikely that the piano music playing in Thomas’s house was the same composition that I’d heard in the lobby of Hotel Providence, but I experienced it as such, the way some films hand off their theme from one site to another as the action unfolds. I remember the music now as one of Satie’s Gymnopédies, but that’s probably false; when Eva was three, she’d fall asleep to that piece (and that piece only), which I would play on my phone, watching her little carousel night-light throw its stars across the wall.

*

“It was in a church. The fourth floor of the church has a little black box theater. It was a student play. My room is across from it and I kept imagining that a version of myself is still in the theater.” “Yes. No one ever leaves a theater. A black box theater. Like the black box of an airplane. That is recovered. Like Schrödinger. The superposition of theaters.” For Thomas, to listen to a story was to become involved in its composition. His speech was as rapid as his movements, often delivered in little puffs, often with his eyes shut, like a child—I’d once told him—dispersing the seeds of a dandelion after having made a wish. Yes, he’d said, or like the cave artists of Patagonia, who, nine thousand years ago, blew pigment from their mouths, creating a halo effect around the hands they held against the wall of their cave. “When the black box is opened in one universe, a dead cat is revealed. In the other universe—but what was this play, the one you are still seeing, forever seeing, across from your hotel?”

*

“Yes, but you are recording?” he asked. “Otherwise we repeat ourselves and it grows unnatural. We will sound like bad actors. Even the transcript will show that we have rehearsed.”

*

The question is: Do we have ears to hear? Although sometimes we listen without them. Beethoven would bite a stick connected to the piano so that he could ‘hear’ through the bones. I like this: ‘Ode to Joy,’ the anthem of Europe, through a stick. There is listening beyond the cochlear, yes? And all of this is true of time, too, not only sound. Vibrations from the past or future may also be received, perhaps also through the teeth. Or through your pen, the poet as seismographer.

*

“—we give her her privacy. She was also forty-five. No, six. Forty-seven. I lose the numbers and the names. We could say that there is a dam in the eyes that breaks—and then the distance rushes in. And she could not tolerate this. Did you know all melanin is brown; it is how the light strikes the iris, how it is reflected to the eyes of the other, that gives them color. Blue eyes, it is Rayleigh scattering—” “Like the sky.” “The blue sky. It would be good in a movie to have the eyes of the actors changing color across scenes, I mean without anyone within the story knowing. So in a sense her eyes aren’t blue unless we look at her. This is true of green, too. Until you interview me my eyes are brown, no? Like everyone else. Unless I look in the mirror. I like this phrase: ‘All light is social.’”

*

Or was it some defense against the reality of losing him—a way to turn it into fiction? Or was it revenge because he was—how did you put it—‘not uncomplicated’?” Her own anger was becoming available now. “And if you were going to invent things, to lie, whatever your fucking excuses, why confess it here, in this way? And then you feel shocked, victimized, when there’s a reaction? And then you are going to tell me that I—”

*

Maybe he would be holding the papers in his hand when I entered my room, his green eyes capable of seeing in the dark. “I’m fine,” I said, but Rosa hadn’t asked.

=============

Many people think that we have some secret apparatus by which we can squeeze glass suddenly into these forms, but it is not so. We have the touch. My son Rudolf has more than I have because he is my son and the touch increases in every generation. The only way to become a glass modeler of skill, I have often said to people, is to get a good great-grandfather who loved glass; then he is to have a son with like tastes; he is to be your grandfather. He in turn will have a son who must, as your father, be passionately fond of glass. You, as his son, can then try your hand, and it is your own fault if you do not succeed. But, if you do not have such ancestors, it is not your fault.
—LEOPOLD BLASCHKA, letter to Mary Ware, 1889

[Miranda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ugh it’s so good when writers write. I love how this is all tangled up in itself.

[Kim B · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m thinking of reading this again. I feel like I should’ve read this in one sitting. I had to take a break in the middle due to work, and as much as I loved it, I do think this is one of those (short) novels that really benefit from being read in one go. When I picked it up again after a couple of days, I re-read part two before continuing on and I still feel like there were so many connections I missed and were fuzzy on. Anyway. All that to say: excellent writing, I was always interested, I recommend reading in one sitting.

[Bob Jacobs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wat een vakman is Ben Lerner. Waar dit boek start met het letterlijk in het water vallen van een interview vloeit het naar compleet onverwachte plekken om te eindigen met een zeldzame schoonheid.

[Laurent De Maertelaer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bam!

[Emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was like watching one of those slow arthouse movies where it's torturous to watch but days later you find yourself still thinking about it and all its cleverness.

Transcription is a novel of three parts. The first follows our narrator as he arrives at the home of his old mentor, Thomas, for what will be his final interview. But our narrator has dropped his phone in a sink, his only recording device for the interview, and somehow can't bring himself to let Thomas know. The third part is in the aftermath of Thomas' death, whereby our narrator confesses to not having recorded the final interview, and thereby having to write it from memory. It raises many questions not only of our narrator's credibility, but the question of whether any of it can be considered truth at all. The final section follows Thomas' son Max, talking to our narrator, who admits to having recorded one of his final in-person conversations with his father, unbeknownst to him.

I think Ben Lerner is a very smart man. And he knows it. There is some incredible writing here, but this wasn't an enjoyable reading experience, and despite being oddly compelling at times, it exasperated me more than anything else. I feel I can sense what Lerner was trying to do here, with all the themes of truth, memory, fathers and sons, technology... but perhaps like with the characters of the book, the real meaning of it all eluded me.

[Sam Small · Rating 5 out of 5]

well... he did again folks.

[Yalla Balagan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ben Lerner boards a train to Providence, Rhode Island, facing the wrong direction, heading to interview his ninety-year-old mentor Thomas, a legendary European filmmaker and theorist of light. He has a cracked phone, a masked face, and a child named Eva at home who is developing what her school counselor calls "school refusal."

He drops the phone in the hotel bathroom sink before dinner. A drowned phone is already a pun in a book about what gets captured and what escapes, and Lerner is painfully, insufferably aware of this, as he is of every other labored symbol he lays before the reader like a cat depositing dead birds.

Thomas lives on Governor Street in a house dense with daguerreotypes and the residue of a century. His memory has begun its own quiet editorial work, erasing trips, merging decades, all of which sounds more interesting on paper than it reads on the page, where Lerner renders it in the kind of airless, self-conscious prose that acts as therapy for his guilty consciousness as a man and a father.

Thomas muses upon MIDI files and phantom voices, on why blue eyes require a witness to exist, on whether dreams belong to the dreamer at all. The conversation is supposedly electric and candlelit, though "unrecorded," which conveniently frees Lerner from having to make any of it feel genuinely alive.

We visit Madrid, meet Nazis on the Swiss border, consider widowerhood, fatherhood, old age, kingfisher, and glass flowers. All in a short one-day reading. Lerner couldn't sustain even these thin conceits across a full novel's worth of pages.

Lerner has spent four novels, including "Leaving the Atocha Station" and "The Topeka School," building a career out of autobiographical fiction that interrogates the ethics of autobiographical fiction, a recursive navel-gazing loop that was tiresome by the second lap. A MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer finalist, he arrives here not at his sharpest but at his most self-congratulatory.

Lerner's peculiar choice to insert a handful of his Uncle Tom political views into the text without any plot justification or necessity turned this already mediocre collection of half-baked musings from mediocre to absolute garbage. For an actual treatment of these themes in a masterful literary fashion, I recommend reading Eshkol Nevo (for the busy) or David Grossman (for the patient) instead.

❤️ 🇮🇱

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe this went over my head a bit. I was captivated by the initial setup of the narrator travelling to meet up with Thomas, but after the first night of conversation the story just got dull and went off on a lot of random side stories (this is mainly Thomas telling anecdotes).