Here are just a few of the threads braided across the 180 pages of Loop: dwarves, swallows, rubbish trucks, notebooks, the sea, survival, sex, friendship, corruption, the future, longing, Ovid, avian transformation, bad poetry, Coriolanus, power, meaning and triviality in art, fame, significance, gang violence, convalescence, rebirth. All these themes and more are woven into a glorious tapestry of literary enthusiasms. Brenda Lozano is among several contemporary Mexican writers whose playfully innovative work has met with acclaim in the UK. And Other Stories publishes Yuri Herrera and Cristina Rivera Garza; Granta and 4th Estate have been publishing the unclassifiable Mexican-American novels of Booker-longlisted Valeria Luiselli. Let’s hope more of Lozano’s work will follow.

The narrator loves books, all kinds of books, and one of her principal themes is how therapeutic literature can be

In Spanish the novel’s title was Cuaderno Ideal: “Ideal Notebook”. 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. Just before they got together, Jonás’s Madrid-born mother had died; this trip is a family pilgrimage of sorts. 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. “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.”

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. In a delicious stroke of self-irony, she names their cat Telemachus. 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. “Wait. I love this song. The neighbour has such good taste. It’s true, writing is more like unravelling than weaving. Unravelling involves having woven something already and there’s always so much to unravel.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brenda Lozano, centre, with the writer Valeria Luiselli, right, and the singer Julieta Venegas, left, in Mexico City, 2010. Photograph: Clasos/LatinContent via Getty Images

The narrator loves books, all kinds of books (“Oh it’s wonderful when one book leads you to another”), and one of her principal themes is how therapeutic literature can be: “The genre people call self-help literature sounds tautological to me; I read all literature as self-help.” She’s in slow recovery from a terrible accident, the nature of which we never discover, only that death was imminent, it left scars, and that she met Jonás on the day she felt well enough to go out for a walk and buy a sorbet. “Nobody knew if I was going to wake up. I didn’t know either. The first thing I heard when I did wake up was one of the nurses singing a Shakira song … This can’t be death, I thought. I knew I’d come back. Back to life. Back to life and its magnificent vulgarity.” The notebook is more than just her way of coping with her lover’s absence – it heals.

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Loop reads like a confessional essay rather than fiction, and like Luiselli’s first novel Faces in the Crowd, it plays with the idea of keeping readers guessing whether it conjures an entirely imaginative world, or represents a kind of autofiction. In the latter, Luiselli tells us that each night her narrator’s husband sneaks glances at her novel in progress. “It’s all fiction, I tell him, but he doesn’t believe me.” Loop offers the same kind of clandestine pleasure, and the same attitude to blurring the truth; Lozano wants the book to feel like coming upon a diary. Its cryptic swivels from one subject to another and its loose, allusive structure give the illusion that it has been thrown together, but the result is far more artful than that.

Halfway through the narrator imagines how the novel might end, on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico: “If this notebook had an ideal ending it would be a trip to the beach with Jonás. In the final lines I’d turn into a swallow, everything I’ve written would turn into a song and the notebook itself would take flight. Feathers would begin to sprout from Jonás’s arms, his feet would gradually leave the sand and he’d start to fly.” But life, she knows, isn’t like that; the book will end instead on the day Jonás returns from Spain. It will meditate not on the transformation of the narrator and her lover into birds, but on the multiple transformations of story she’s effected across the loom of these pages, and in the minds of us, her fortunate readers.

• Gavin Francis’s Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession is out next May. Loop by Brenda Lozano, translated by Annie McDermott, is published by Charco (£9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.