Reader Score
80%
80% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 11 reviews on
"Verónica Gerber writes with a luminous intimacy; her novel is clever, vibrant, moving, profoundly original. Reading it made me feel as if the world had been rebuilt." --Francisco Goldman
"From the very beginning, Verónica Gerber set out to write a novel that would end up at a loss for words. She alone could achieve this feat: because she's a visual artist who takes everything she reads in as concentric circles threaded with color, and because she writes essays on painters who write across canvasses and writers who paint plots from the realities of life. . . . She alone could bring the necessary silence to a novel so perfect it ended up leaving me speechless as well." --Jorge F. Hernández
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.
Verónica Gerber Bicecci is a visual artist who writes. In 2013 she was awarded the third Aura Estrada prize for literature. She is an editor with Tumbona Ediciones, a publishing cooperative with a catalogue that explores the intersections between literature and art.
Entropy, "Best of 2017: Best Fiction Books"
"Within the deliberately fractured text, themes echo and time folds and unfolds. A spare, artfully constructed meditation on loss, both personal and national." --Kirkus
"Gerber Bicecci's experimental novel takes a unique approach to topics like debilitating loneliness, political repression, and epistemological crises." --Publishers Weekly
"This is a novel to puzzle over as its episodes, which are not chronological, align and create points of reference that allow readers to decipher Verónica's story just as she herself does." --Booklist
"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
"A wonderfully kaleidoscopic novel--so inventive, thought provoking, and offbeat." --Chicago Review of Books
"Empty Set is a visceral and lucid story and also an art object." --Literary Hub