Photograph: Clasos/LatinContent via Getty Images Unravelling involves having woven something already and there’s always so much to unravel.”īrenda Lozano, centre, with the writer Valeria Luiselli, right, and the singer Julieta Venegas, left, in Mexico City, 2010. It’s true, writing is more like unravelling than weaving. The notebook is her equivalent of Penelope’s loom in it she weaves and unravels ideas until Jonás’s return, getting all her news of the outside world and her music through the wall from her neighbour’s TV and stereo. In a delicious stroke of self-irony, she names their cat Telemachus. The apartment they share is a small one in Mexico City, with paper-thin walls, but their bed, “the site of domestic ambivalence”, is compared to the famous bed of Penelope and Odysseus, carved from a living tree. “Help me choose a place for it in the study,” Jonás said.” Now I wonder if we should have put the photo of his mother in the bedroom.” She wonders if their love might be his way of coping with grief, then if she should have made more space for that grief in their lives: “Jonás has a photo of his mother in the study we share … Jonás wanted to put it in the bedroom, and I suggested putting it in the study.

Just before they got together, Jonás’s Madrid-born mother had died this trip is a family pilgrimage of sorts. In form and in looping, oblique and fragmentary content, it’s a journal kept by the 30-year old narrator while her boyfriend, Jonás, is across the Atlantic in Spain. In Spanish the novel’s title was Cuaderno Ideal: “Ideal Notebook”.

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