Cuaderno Ideal
Rights sold:
  • English (Charco Press)

Cuaderno Ideal / Loop

Novel , 2014

Alfaguara

Winner 2019 English PEN Award 

A Proustian love story told by the voice of a young woman waiting for her lover to return.

Loop is a love story narrated from the point of view of a woman who waits for her boyfriend Jonás to return from a trip to Spain. They met when she was recovering from an accident and he had just lost his mother. Soon after that, they were living together. She waits for him as a sort of contemporary Penelope who, instead of knitting only to then un-knit, she writes and erases her thoughts in a notebook: Proust, a dwarf, a swallow, a dreamy cat or David Bowie singing ‘Wild is the Wind’, make up some of the strands that are woven together in this tapestry of longing and waiting.

Written in a sometimes irreverent style, in short fragments that at points are more like haikus than conventional narrative prose, this is a truly original reflection on love, relationships, solitude and the aesthetics and purpose of writing.

"A glorious tapestry of ideas." The Guardian

"An intimate book that starts small and expands steadily outward, with a cumulative effect both moving and hopeful." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A meditation on uselessness; a manifesto in its favour. Brenda Lozano is an anatomist of the everyday..." 3ammagazine

"This book is a teachable thing. It can show us how best to learn to 'unlearn' ourselves in order to better ourselves." Booksandbao

"Experimental, witty and disruptive." Jessica Payn, Splice

"Loop arrives when we have all been asked to reassess ideas of control we had over our lives; reading it is both a comfort and a provocation." AirLight

"Lozano is a marvellous writer, bright, funny, subtly perverse, always moving." Francisco Goldman

"Lozano knows she is gifted, and has no shame in showing it." Margarita García Robayo, author of Fish Soup

"Lozano’s anti-novel throws down nodal points of entry and departure to create seemingly random junctions between mythology, fairy tale, pop culture and literature. [...] It can be read as a manifesto for realist magic as opposed to magic realism. It can be read aloud between lovers or in solitary silence. But most important of all, it should be read, period." Chris Brownsword, The Quietus

“Brenda Lozano’s books rub shoulders with the best of Latin American literature, without exhausting themselves in localisms or squabbles. An invitation to assess reality from other traditions.” Faena

“Because this is a smaller version of Penelope’s story, of Metamorphoses, of the sea, violence, great literature, death, time, and love going from big bold print to the insignificance of tiny letters. Because that’s what Cuaderno ideal is all about, the most useless stories in a world governed by the most important, the most transcendental, the most famous.” Manuel Barroso