The novel Empty Words, first published in 1996, is a perfect introduction to the levreriano, or Levrero-esque. It charts the author’s attempts to turn his life around using “graphological self-therapy”: if he can improve his handwriting, he thinks, he’ll be able to improve his personality, “transforming a whole plethora of bad behaviors into good ones and catapulting [himself] blissfully into a life of happiness, joy, money, and success.” And yet as he persists with his daily handwriting practice, he comes to realize that the exercises “are becoming less calligraphical and more literary as time goes on.” Another kind of text is trying to break through: “a flow, a rhythm, a seemingly empty form” is guiding his hand, and he finds himself continuing to write without knowing what it is that he’s writing, hoping to uncover the mystery of this “empty” text as he goes.

This is pure Levrero: for him, writing is both a mystery to be solved and a means of solving it, at once a tool for exploring the unconscious and a by-product of those explorations. Also typically levreriano is the way his efforts to understand this mysterious force are discussed in the same breath as his attempts to give up smoking, complaints about the weather, accounts of his dreams, investigations into the inner workings of his computer, and musings about the behavior of his dog. Levrero writes about all these things in the same unmistakable voice, combining an earnestly matter-of-fact desire to make himself clear with a sardonic, deadpan, and fantastically absurd sense of humor. Here he is on his worsening mental state: “I can feel myself getting more anxious by the day, at a rate I can even represent graphically by means of a curve showing my daily intake of cigarettes.” On (short-lived) improvements to his daily routine: “Allow me to record, so it’s known in the centuries to come, that I’m writing this at eight thirty in the morning.” On trying to program the computer to make sounds: “After a while, I managed to bring about some interesting bird-like cheeping.” And practicing writing the letter r, which he finds particularly troublesome: “rhododendron, rower, sombrero, bra-strap, parricide, reverberate, procrastinate, corduroys (I repeat: corduroys).”