Levrero made his first departure from the conventions of ordinary life at the age of fourteen, when a heart murmur (combined, perhaps, with a dislike of going to lessons) obliged him to stay home from school and spend his days in bed, reading and listening to the tango station Radio Clarín—which, thanks to a system he’d devised involving pieces of string, he could turn on and off without having to get up. He didn’t finish high school and has said that the Guardia Nueva tango club in Montevideo served as his university. It was there, for example, that he first heard about James Joyce, and it also gave him the name for the Guardia Nueva secondhand bookshop he ran with a friend throughout his twenties. Though staunchly apolitical in later life, Levrero was briefly a member of the youth wing of the Uruguayan Communist Party and was one of the protesters who ended up with diarrhea after fascists poisoned some chorizo donated to a march in support of Cuba in 1962. (José Mujica, later the president of Uruguay, was on the same march).1

In 1966, at the age of twenty-six, Levrero wrote his first novel, La ciudad (The City). It was inspired by the work of Kafka: until reading him, Levrero said, he “didn’t realize it was possible to tell the truth,” and La ciudad was “almost an attempt to translate Kafka into Uruguayan.” From this point on, Levrero wrote some twenty books, among them the dreamlike “involuntary trilogy” of La ciudad, París (Paris), and El lugar (The Place); the rollicking detective-novel parody Nick Carter se divierte mientras el lector es asesinado y yo agonizo (Nick Carter Enjoys Himself While the Reader Is Murdered and I Expire), and the autobiographical El discurso vacío (Empty Words) and La novela luminosa (The Luminous Novel, forthcoming from Coffee House Press and And Other Stories)—this last, a book with a 450-page prologue explaining why it was impossible to write the book itself, being widely recognized as his masterpiece. It is astonishing, considering the wildly varied nature of his literary output, that it should all form a coherent whole, and yet it does: everything Levrero wrote is instantly recognizable as his.