The Transcriptionist
THE TRANSCRIPTIONIST is one weird novel. I’m still not sure what it was about.
Lena, the main character, works at the RECORD, the biggest and most respected newspaper in New York. I guess THE TIMES wouldn’t give Amy Roland permission to use their name, but “the Grey Lady” is mentioned and that’s THE TIMES. Anyway, Lena is the last of the transcriptionists; she takes calls from reporters who need her to type their interviews for them, and e-mail her finished copy back to them and also return the tape of the transcription. The problem is she’s becoming claustrophobic, working on the 17th floor all by herself, just her and a pigeon on the window outside the room, that she talks to occasionally. She has an admirer of sorts, Russell, one of the reporters who calls her Carol. She doesn’t immediately correct him.
Then she meets Arlene Lebow, a blind woman, on the subway; they make a connection, but the next day she reads about the blind woman being eaten by a lion at the zoo. Apparently she swam the moat to commit suicide. This event really depresses Lena. Then the blind woman’s body disappears and Lena sets out to find her.
Lena also has a buddy named Kov who spends all day piecing together tattered versions of a ancient obituaries. He’s not who he seems to be.
Lena is looking for a way to escape her prison on the 17th floor, and she finds it when she clashes with the paper’s star reporter, a foreign correspondent, who sends her an interview about Iraq, then tries to kill it minutes later. Let it suffice to say that Lena doesn’t kill it. It appears in the paper the next day.
Not everybody can get an obituary printed in THE RECORD, at least one written by a reporter, not the normal obituary writer. And that’s Lena’s final gesture at THE RECORD. Guess who it’s for.
Lena, the main character, works at the RECORD, the biggest and most respected newspaper in New York. I guess THE TIMES wouldn’t give Amy Roland permission to use their name, but “the Grey Lady” is mentioned and that’s THE TIMES. Anyway, Lena is the last of the transcriptionists; she takes calls from reporters who need her to type their interviews for them, and e-mail her finished copy back to them and also return the tape of the transcription. The problem is she’s becoming claustrophobic, working on the 17th floor all by herself, just her and a pigeon on the window outside the room, that she talks to occasionally. She has an admirer of sorts, Russell, one of the reporters who calls her Carol. She doesn’t immediately correct him.
Then she meets Arlene Lebow, a blind woman, on the subway; they make a connection, but the next day she reads about the blind woman being eaten by a lion at the zoo. Apparently she swam the moat to commit suicide. This event really depresses Lena. Then the blind woman’s body disappears and Lena sets out to find her.
Lena also has a buddy named Kov who spends all day piecing together tattered versions of a ancient obituaries. He’s not who he seems to be.
Lena is looking for a way to escape her prison on the 17th floor, and she finds it when she clashes with the paper’s star reporter, a foreign correspondent, who sends her an interview about Iraq, then tries to kill it minutes later. Let it suffice to say that Lena doesn’t kill it. It appears in the paper the next day.
Not everybody can get an obituary printed in THE RECORD, at least one written by a reporter, not the normal obituary writer. And that’s Lena’s final gesture at THE RECORD. Guess who it’s for.
No comments have been added yet.
