A Millions Most-Anticipated Book of 2024
“Mauro Javier Cárdenas has knocked down the novel as we know it, and built a cathedral out of the debris.” —Carlos Fonseca
“Cárdenas’s narrative engines include oneiric séances, unheralded victims rebaptized as 20th-century Surrealists, a plausible robot named Roberto Bolaño, and lives fractured by trauma, death or computer algorithms …Cárdenas reminds us that Surrealism also had a social ethos, to destabilize ruinous order through art. Similarly, this is what American Abductions offers: the art-polemic as a defiant, befitting medium for our dire times.” —Gina Apostol, The New York Times
"One of the most affecting and inventive English-language novels in recent memory, a playful and experimental narrative about narratives in which the question of who is telling the story — and how they go about doing it — proves the real subject." —Robert Rubsam, The Washington Post
“Cárdenas writes with both playfulness and erudition. The long, looping sentences brim with references to writers and surrealists, as well as with rage and dark humor. His concern is less with individual stories, and more with the effects of fear and trauma on an entire population. A dark, original work.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“Mauro Javier Cárdenas can maunder with the best. The syntax in his first novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again (2016), shuttled between telegraphic and garrulous, but his next, Aphasia (2021), sank into pillowy heaps of rhetoric like those in the new American Abductions. … Yet, while his novels to date dazzle with verbal pyrotechnics, they also set off deeper disturbances.” —John Domini, The Brooklyn Rail
“Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas’s new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philp K. Dick and Samuel Delany, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged. … American Abductions tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor.” —Daniella Fishman, The Millions
★ 2024-04-05
Ecuadorian writer Cárdenas contemplates a dystopian future for Latin Americans in the U.S.
Ada, an architect, carries the childhood trauma of her father Antonio’s unexpected deportation. A U.S. citizen born in Colombia, he was abducted while driving her and her younger sister to school in San Francisco; in the grim and eerily familiar near future of the novel, immigration status is meaningless. The Racist in Chief demonizes all Latin Americans; they’re surveilled and in constant danger of abduction, incarceration in governmental detention centers, and deportation. As Antonio explains, “Americans can’t imagine the conditions, and if they can’t imagine the conditions, they can’t imagine themselves as refugees, and if they can’t imagine themselves as refugees, they will conclude that refugees are different from them, a different species....” Ada’s sister, Eva, an installation artist, has moved to Bogotá to join their father. When he’s hospitalized, the sisters continue his work interviewing Latin American abductees around the globe. These interviews and the voices of participants in a dream forum serve as a sort of Greek chorus: “I imagined being part of a collective mind, the mind of all of us who have been deported and whose family members have been abducted, a mind like a sea struck by a meteor, a sea that ceases to be blue or green as it overtakes the continents, the fish turning into lizards and the lizards into birds with gills, a sea that is no longer the sea but a carnival of destruction and a cemetery and a neighborhood where I might run into you, Antonio....” Cárdenas writes with both playfulness and erudition. The long, looping sentences brim with references to writers and surrealists, as well as with rage and dark humor. His concern is less with individual stories, and more with the effects of fear and trauma on an entire population.
A dark, original work.
