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Summary
Summary
"A haunting and provocative novel about the mysteries of life and a death, the written word, things seen and unseen, heard and forgotten. Amy Rowland's writing is compelling and masterful." --Delia Ephron, author of The Lion Is In
Once, there were many transcriptionists at the Record, a behemoth New York City newspaper, but new technology and the ease of communication has put most of them out of work. So now Lena, the last transcriptionist, sits alone in a room--a human conduit, silently turning reporters' recorded stories into print--until the day she encounters a story so shocking that it shatters the reverie that has become her life.
This exquisite novel, written by a woman who spent more than a decade as a transcriptionist at the New York Times, asks probing questions about journalism and ethics, about the decline of the newspaper and the failure of language. It is also the story of a woman's effort to establish her place in an increasingly alien and alienating world.
"A strange, mesmerizing novel about language, isolation, ethics, technology, and the lack of trust between institutions and the people they purportedly serve . . . A fine debut novel about the decline of newspapers and the subsequent loss of humanity--and yes, these are related." -- Booklist, starred review
"Ambitious and fascinating . . . Disturbing and powerful . . . Recommended for fans of literary fiction." -- Library Journal
"Rowland's farcical approach . . . is balanced by the novel's realistic insights into journalistic integrity, the evolution of contemporary newspaper publishing, and, more broadly, the importance of genuine communication." -- Publishers Weekly
"Unforgettable. Written with such delight, compassion, and humanity, it's newsworthy." --Alex Gilvarry, author of From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant
Author Notes
Amy Rowland is the author of two novels. The Transcriptionist received the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Norman Mailer Center, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the New York Times , the Southern Review , the Iowa Review , Literary Hub , New Letters , and other publications. A former editor at the New York Times Book Review , she is currently a lecturer at University of California, Berkeley. She has also taught at Princeton University and the School of the New York Times.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
New York Times veteran Rowland treads familiar ground (familiar to her, at least) in her debut novel, set primarily amid the remote offices of Record, a fictional newspaper. Lena is the newspaper's sole remaining transcriptionist, her job having been made nearly redundant by technology. Lonely and prone to melancholy, she is haunted both by the words that are edited out of her transcribed stories prior to publication, and by her childhood fear of mountain lions. Both preoccupations come to a head after a blind woman, with whom Lena had a brief encounter, is found mauled to death in the Bronx Zoo's lion exhibit. Lena's identification with the dead woman verges on obsession as she researches the woman's life and death. Rowland's farcical approach (for example, Lena finds mental safety in periodically donning the biohazard escape hood that she was given by the newspaper) is balanced by the novel's realistic insights into journalistic integrity, the evolution of contemporary newspaper publishing, and, more broadly, the importance of genuine communication. "Listening," notes Lena, "helps us recognize our absurdity, our humanity." (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A blind woman's suicide prompts a newspaper staffer to rethink journalism in particularand the nature of existence in general. Rowland's debut novel centers on Lena, an employee at major New York daily the Record, where she transcribes interview tapes and takes reporting calls from foreign correspondents. It's a dying job in a dying industry, and Rowland emphasizes the strangeness of the gig and Lena's own isolation within it. (Conspicuous references to Beckett, O'Connor and Calvino bolster the out-of-the-mainstream mood.) A story about a woman who broke into the lions' den at the Bronx Zoo and was promptly killed sparks Lena's sorrow and curiosity (they had a brief encounter), and the novel turns on her effort to learn more about the woman's life than simple journalism will deliver. Rowland deliberately presents the profession in a fun-house mirror: Staffers are given emergency "escape hoods" instead of bonuses thanks to post-9/11 anxiety; an aging staffer spends days musing over the obituary archives; and the publisher's pronouncements are pompous even by CEO standards. In stuffing this milieu with bits of mystery, romance and aphoristic riffs on listening and silence, Rowland has taken on a bit too much; the novel's tone unsteadily shifts from the bluntly realistic to the fuzzily philosophical. Even so, individual scenes and characters are very well-turned: Lena's visit to a potter's field where the mauled woman is buried, a conversation with the security guard at the lions' den, the preening investigative reporter who makes a major error about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Rowland has a talent for making the real world just a touch more Day-Glo and off center, but Lena's own concerns about listening and being get short shrift in the process. An appealing attempt to wed the weird and everyday in a newsroom settingit's a cousin to Renata Adler's Speedboat (1976)that never quite finds solid footing.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Lena may well be the last newspaper transcriptionist in America. She sits alone with a headset and a Dictaphone and transcribes every single word that has been recorded for the Record. Her life is as colorless as the room she works in in a word, gray. The window of her office has not been open for three years, not since a transcriptionist opened it to see the body of a reporter who committed suicide by jumping to his death. Lena spends most of her timetranscribing long interviews that are incorporated into the newspaper's stories, and even as she drowns in words, she believes in the power of language. Words, she thought, would save her; but, ironically, as she copies the words of others, she speaks to fewer and fewer people. Rowland, a former transcriptionist for the New York Times, has written a strange, mesmerizing novel about language, isolation, ethics, technology, and the lack of trust between institutions and the people they purportedly serve. It references Chaucer and the literary denizens of the Algonquin Hotel and recalls in its own idiosyncratic way Herman Melville's equally enigmatic short story Bartleby, the Scrivener. A fine debut novel about the decline of newspapers and the subsequent loss of humanity and yes, these are related.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
the same week I began reading Amy Rowland's debut novel, "The Transcriptionist," a Malaysian jetliner vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. It's a testament to the eerie power of Rowland's fictional world that while I watched and read the news about the search for the plane, hands to my mouth, I wondered: "Who will call this story in to Lena? And can Lena bear it?" Lena Respass, the protagonist of "The Transcriptionist," works above 43rd Street in the offices of a New York City newspaper called The Record. The equipment required for her job includes "a headset, a Dictaphone to play the tapes that must be transcribed, and patience, a willingness to become a human conduit as the words of others enter through her ears, course through her veins and drip out unseen through fast-moving fingertips." (Rowland herself was once a transcriptionist for The New York Times; she is now an editor at the Book Review. The transcription room closed in 2008.) Lena lives alone at the Parkside Evangeline, a Salvation Army residence on Gramercy Park overseen by the Dickensian widow Mrs. Pelletier. Two meals a day are included in her rent: "Glazed meat, always the glaze, apricot glaze, sweet glaze, cloying glaze. She cannot." Lena talks to a pigeon that she finds, day after day, on the "balconette" outside her office window: "Jump! You're a bird. Go on." An existential heroine, Lena has no friends, but spends her time walking around Manhattan, her footsteps echoing those of Julius, the protagonist of Teju Cole's "Open City," and W.G. Sebald's pensive narrators before him. The lengthy interview transcripts and harrowing reports from the field have begun to take their toll on Lena: "She awakens in the morning with someone else's words, someone else's thoughts, ribboning around her brain." When she records a call from Baghdad and notices that the article the next day omits the mention of a "charred foot comma unattached to anything," Lena sees the excised appendage in her dreams. But it is the story of a blind woman who's mauled to death after swimming the moat at the Bronx Zoo's lion den that finally breaks Lena. She becomes obsessed with the woman and her body, which seems to have disappeared, and spends the novel tracking it down, attempting to comprehend what it is about the woman that so affects her. "The Transcriptionist" can be read through many lenses. It is (as J.M. Coetzee wrote in relation to Salman Rushdie's "The Moor's Last Sigh") a "postmodern textual romp." The novel reflects on its own form by titling chapters with newspaper headlines like "Hearing Is the Last Sense to Abandon the Dying" and "Mudslide Buries Hundreds in Pakistan; Teenagers Say Oral Sex Is Not Sex." Rowland plays with notions of truth and reliability (Lena "tells herself lots of stories when sitting alone with the headsets, but she no longer trusts which parts are true") and considers the impossibility of journalistic authenticity: "She has come to feel sorry for the haunted-eyed reporters who work harder and longer to chase fragments for their fragmented audience." Lena's brain is a kind of palimpsest: "She lives in this shadow state, always reading the news she knows over the news that makes it into print, and not just reading the shadows, but also living in them, somewhere between waiting and searching." And when Lena, perhaps inevitably, becomes involved in the creation of the news, all hell breaks loose. It is the responsibility of a journalist to report the truth, but what if - Rowland asks - objective reality is a fiction? Rowland's referentiality can feel heavy-handed. In the first 40 pages, Lena references Beckett, Coetzee, Nabokov, Saramago, Bradbury, O'Connor, Eliot, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein and the Bible. When Lena apologizes - "I quote from things a lot. I sometimes forget how to talk to people. And quotes help me" - an older colleague notes: "You don't do it to help you talk to people. You do it to preserve your distance." I concur. But as I learned while falling in love with the work of David Foster Wallace (and Jennifer Egan's "The Keep," and that crazy part in Adam Johnson's "The Orphan Master's Son" when Kim Jongil walks into the novel), you're allowed to keep reading for sheer pleasure even if you're not sure you completely understand everything that's going on. (That's what rereadings - and tequila-fevered discussions with friends - are for.) And "The Transcriptionist" holds many pleasures. Rowland's depiction of a "Mad Men"-meets-hamster-cage newsroom is riotously funny, and her secondary characters are sharp and affecting. During a martini date at the Algonquin, Lena overhears a neighboring couple: "Is this where you brought her?' the woman on the couch asks. The husband looks at her and frowns, throwing his swizzle stick like a spear in his drink. 'Margaret, it was a crime of opportunity.'" And the bizarre lucidity of Lena's ferry trip across Long Island Sound to Hart Island, where unclaimed bodies are buried in the potter's field by New York prisoners, brings to mind the wacky genius of Mary Robison and Denis Johnson. ("From Rikers Island to Hart Island, that's cold," a prisoner says wryly.) As a novelist and reader, I come to books seeking both solace and wisdom. What stays with me from "The Transcriptionist" isn't Rowland's postmodern pyrotechnics, but the ache of relating to a woman who is in the process of recognizing her own despair. As I wonder how a sky can be vast enough to swallow a jetliner, I think of Lena and her pigeon at the window of a building The New York Times abandoned years ago. (It is now occupied by Yahoo.) The world waits to hear what stories the news will bring, and Lena "stares into the darkness trying to face the terror of the unseen." AMANDA EYRE WARD is the author of a story collection and four novels, most recently "Close Your Eyes." Her new novel, "Homecoming," will be published in February.
Library Journal Review
Tucked away in an almost forgotten corner of a large office building, young Lena Respass toils away at a virtually obsolete profession for a legendary New York City-based newspaper, the Record. She's a transcriptionist, typing out news stories reported to her verbally from around the world. This ambitious and fascinating debut novel is perhaps most essentially about the kind of work Lena does-listening. The story is set in motion by Lena's chance encounter with a mysterious blind woman, who warns her, "Be careful what you listen to. Be careful what you hear." Single, terribly alone in New York, and plagued by paralyzing doubts about the meaning of her life and work, Lena has come to regard what the paper defines as news as dangerous and deeply misguided-mindless and fawning celebrity profiles alongside stories of misfortune, war, and death. Her belief is substantiated when she looks into the story of a lion mauling reported in the paper. By the end, Rowland will have some very unflattering things to say about the state of modern journalism, especially its increasingly cozy and collaborationist relationship with government. -VERDICT Disturbing and powerful; the skillfully drawn Lena may remind some readers of an existentialist hero. Recommended for fans of literary fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 11/22/13.]-Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.