A meditation on reality: Transcription, by Ben Lerner, reviewed
Near the beginning of Ben Lerner’s new novel the unnamed narrator recalls visiting an exhibition of botanical models made by the father-and-son glass artists Leopold and Rudolf Blashka in Dresden in the 19th century. Like Zeuxis’s grapes, so lifelike that birds would come and peck at them, the models, ‘impossibly delicate things’, challenge the narrator’s sense of the real: I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instant and as artificial the next, a kind of duck/rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed. Transcription, like Lerner’s previous three novels, is an autofiction about the tension between the given
