Transcription ends with an epilogue. It’s a letter, or at least an extract from a letter, written by Leopold Blaschka, a 19th-century Bohemia-born artist who, with his son Rudolf, crafted intricate and breathtakingly realistic models of flowers, plants and sea creatures made out of glass. So astounding was their technique, so uncanny, that sceptics assumed they must be using secret devices. “It is not so,” he insisted. “We have the touch. My son Rudolf has more than I have because he is my son and the touch increases in every generation.” Until this point, Blaschka hasn’t been referenced by name even once. But here, in coda form, is the essence of Transcription, a novel about touch, devices and familial inheritances that is itself intricate, uncanny, sometimes breathtakingly realistic.
It begins with a middle-aged American narrator travelling to Providence, Rhode Island, home to Brown University, where Ben Lerner studied poetry and political theory as an undergraduate. He is there to conduct a magazine interview with a polymathic German intellectual named Thomas. No ordinary assignment: Thomas was his mentor at college, the father of his friend Max, and now, at the age of 90, this conversation is expected to be his last will and testament. At the hotel, bathos strikes – the narrator drops his smartphone in a sink; it’s unusable and he’s too embarrassed to confess. Thomas soon gets into his conversational stride, but his rich sentences go unrecorded.
