[Reading The Incompletes] is like carrying around an atmosphere. I read it awhile and then am compelled to write. I love the Hotel Salgado, the narrative dotted with gems in unceremonious settings. Sergio Chejfec is an admirable writer and finely translated by Heather Cleary.”—Patti Smith
“Sergio Chejfec’s The Incompletes is a masterfully nested narrative where writing—its presence on the page, its course through time, its prismatic dispersion of meaning—is the true protagonist. Heather Cleary’s flawless translation adds yet another layer to this extraordinary palimpsest of a novel.”—Hernan Diaz
"On first reading Chejfec, we recall many admired authors, but at a later moment—a more solid and lasting one—we realize that he resembles no one, and that he has chosen an unusual and quite distinctive path, one that reveals itself slowly because of the demanding and very personal searches the author himself carries out in his narrative."—Enrique Vila-Matas
"Just like you must accept dream logic when you're sleeping, you must accept The Incompletes for what it is, to allow the endless descriptions of rooms, city streets, broken televisions, the cold, peeling walls and dirty window panes, to take hold of you. In the end you'll stumble out of the book, a bit dazed, wondering what the hell you just read, but it's an enjoyable trek if you like beautiful sentences."—NPR
"It is hard to think of another contemporary writer who, marrying true intellect with simple description of a space, simultaneously covers so little and so much ground."—Times Literary Supplement
"If genius can be defined by the measure of depth of an artist's perception into human experience, then Chejfec is a genius."—Coffin Factory
"In a just world Sergio Chejfec would be on the lips of the most thoughtful and curious readers; The Incompletes straddles the line between fiction and travelogue, philosophy and dreams. The novel delves into memory, place, and the mysteries we can never know about ourselves. Beautifully translated, the story has not left my mind since I closed the book."—Mark Haber, Brazos Bookstore
"The Incompletes is, simply put, his best book, a "thriller" in a way for him, but the thing that got me is how it's also an inside out Madame Bovary."—Javier Molea, McNally Jackson
"A beautifully baffling book about the peripatetic wanderings of your own mind through the hotels, hallways, and postcards of the protagonists, or about the instability hiding in every apparently solid building, or maybe even how you don’t know an event is significant until some disconnected and celestial phenomenon illuminates it."—Josh Cook, Porter Square Books
"Reading Chejfec is magical."—Vertigo
"The Incompletes is a departure for the Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec. Or perhaps it’s just a variation on a favorite theme: the malleability of memory. The most literary of his novels, it openly plays with the concepts of perception, projection, and characterization."—Tara Cheeseman, On The Seawall
2019-09-02
A novel of lonesomeness and recollection that takes the construction of characters as its subject.
The question "Who's responsible for this?" often takes on a tone of indignation, but in Argentine writer Chejfec's latest novel it's not an admonishment so much as a practical consideration. As the book opens, the narrator informs readers that he is going to tell us a story—"something that happened one night, years ago, and the events of the morning and afternoon that followed"—and yet the novel is filled with several stories, large and small, as well as multiple nights and evenings. Just as the missives described by the narrator from his friend Felix grow from postcards to full-blown letters, so too do the accumulated moments grow larger and more significant as the novel moves from Buenos Aires to Barcelona to Moscow, where Felix checks in at the Hotel Salgado. From there Felix's story intersects with that of Masha, the hotel's owner. We're let in on her innermost thoughts and feelings, as we are with Felix's. She's as persistent as Felix is transient, going about her day wrapped in shapeless bundles and gliding across the floors in shearling boots as she completes her tasks. As their stories begin to intertwine and pieces of their stories begin to resemble one another (a woman whom Felix met at lodgings prior to the Hotel Salgado complained to a clerk about losing money in her pants; Masha, while cleaning a room she is staying in, finds a stack of money in the closet), readers are uneasily reminded of the fact that, in the end, neither Felix nor Masha is telling the story at all. They barely say a word—it is the narrator adorning simple correspondence from a friend with drama and stemwinding diction. The effect it conjures gets at the heart of narration in general: What is the responsibility of the storyteller to adhere to the facts as told? Is it possible to ever completely know what happened? If the story is vivid and engaging—as this book is—does it matter?
In this innovative novel, Chejfec is gesturing toward the grand European traditions on his own terms.
