Empty Set
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
“A triumphant, one-of-a-kind experiment . . . Much of Empty Set concerns the trauma of exile and its long-lasting effect on interrupted lives.” —Chicago Review of Books How do you draw an affair? A family? Can a Venn diagram show the ways overlaps turn into absences, tree rings tell us what happens when mothers leave? Can we fall in love according to the hop skip of an acrostic? Empty Set is a novel of patterns, its young narrator’s attempt at making sense of inevitable loss, tracing her way forward in loops, triangles, and broken lines. “The pure pleasure of this book is being inside our heroine Vero’s head: the way she Venns relationships like an auto-dendrochronologist, someone who has serious questions about plywood, but also about exile, Argentina, and the kind of loneliness that accompanies being part of an empty set.” —The Rumpus “A smart story of love and loss with a clever mix of narrative techniques, Empty Set may be an antidote to the current climate of despair.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “An experimental mix of prose, diagrams and literary artifacts that is also, somehow, breathlessly plotted.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune “In Empty Set, Verónica Gerber Bicecci has found a seemingly new and fascinating way to tell and show us a vital story of modern loneliness, exile, and imagination.” —Words Without Borders “Within the deliberately fractured text, themes echo and time folds and unfolds. A spare, artfully constructed meditation on loss, both personal and national.” —Kirkus Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bicecci's experimental novel takes a unique approach to topics like debilitating loneliness, political repression, and epistemological crises. The narrator is Veronica, an aspiring visual artist, who lives with her brother in "the bunker," a Mexico City apartment from which their mother, an exile who fled the Argentinian dictatorship, vanished when they were teenagers. Living in this "time capsule where everything is in a state of permanent neglect," both siblings are "professional suspicionists" whose mother's disappearance has affected the way they see the world: "Events always had a dark side, a shaded area we couldn't make out, one that, despite being empty, always meant something more." The novel whimsically chronicles Veronica's various attempts to plumb these unknowable depths by studying tree rings, reading Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, and sifting through the papers of a deceased writer whose history mirrors her mother's. In further efforts to decipher life's mysteries, she also represents her familial and romantic relationships as Venn diagrams, which (among other illustrations) are reproduced in the text: "Visualized this way, from above,' the world reveals relationships and functions that are not completely obvious." The graphics may strike readers as more gimmicky than revelatory, but nonetheless Bicecci has created a charming, elliptical novel.
