The empty speech

One man, a literary genius named Mario Labrero, gets together with himself to perform graphological exercises. His desire is to get out of the existential stagnation in which he is ensconced. He thinks, and so he was advised, that if he focuses on an arbitrary goal - improving his handwriting - he will get his vitality back. But during these exercises, the writing and the mind are diverted to the daily life of the writer. A different kind of literature emerges between the writing slots. The letters make up words, the words pile up into sentences. Slowly, the empty speech sketches a personal epic, the drama of the modern, bored subject, trapped between walls and people, and tries to burrow inside it in search of meaning for life. This book positioned Mario Labrero as one of the most important Latin American writers of the last decades of the twentieth century. Its honesty, its deceptive simplicity, the prose that mediates the self and puts it on display, its existentialism, made this book a must-read among readers of Spanish-language literature.