Gemma Sieff at Artforum:
Transcription is a work of art for a new age of mechanical reproduction, a meditation on imperfect facsimile. Its cover features an embossed finger- and thumb-printed brick with rounded corners, in my judgment an iPhone-shaped Rosetta stone as satisfyingly tactile as braille. It signals the degree to which the novel is preoccupied with the absolute centricity of the smartphone in contemporary life, as a crutch, an addiction, a lifeline, a miracle . . . whatever is the opposite of a vestigial limb.
The book is organized as a triptych, each section set in a different city and centered around some kind of face-off. “Hotel Providence” sees the unnamed Lerner stand-in traveling to Rhode Island by Amtrak, to interview his ninety-year-old mentor Thomas, “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.” Masked up, the narrator sits in one of those backward seats that are “facing the past,” as his ten-year-old daughter Eva refers to them. She, we learn, has been refusing to go to school; her “best friend has kind of left her for another girl,” the narrator will later explain to Thomas, or maybe she is protesting “the disasters of the world. Everything with Covid. The sky orange with Canadian wildfire smoke. There was that day of floods, we were almost swept away on the expressway. There is the war—the wars . . . ”
more here.
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