The Revolutionaries Try Again

by Mauro Javier Cardenas

Overview

Three childhood friends reunite to transform Ecuador only to find their idealism has succumbed to the cynicism of their fathers.

Extravagant, absurd, and self-aware, The Revolutionaries Try Again plays out against the lost decade of Ecuador’s austerity and the stymied idealism of three childhood friends—an expat, a bureaucrat, and a playwright—who are as sure about the evils of dictatorship as they are unsure of everything else, including each other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566894463
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	09/06/2016
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Mauro Javier Cardenas grew up in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and graduated with a degree in economics from Stanford University. Excerpts from his first novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again, have appeared in Conjunctions, the Antioch Review, Guernica, Witness, and BOMB. His interviews and essays on/with László Krasznahorkai, Javier Marías, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Juan Villoro, and António Lobo Antunes have appeared in Music & Literature, the San Francisco Chronicle, BOMB, and the Quarterly Conversation.

Table of Contents

PART ONE: ANTONIO & LEOPOLDO
I. LEOPOLDO CALLS ANTONIO
II. ANTONIO IN SAN FRANCISCO
III. LEOPOLDO AND THE OLIGARCHS
IV. ANTONIO EDITS HIS BABY CHRIST MEMOIR
V. ANTONIO IN GUAYAQUIL
VI. ANTONIO’S GRANDMOTHER GIVES ADVICE
VII. ANTONIO & LEOPOLDO AT DON ALBAN’S

PART TWO: ROLANDO & EVA
VIII. ROLANDO & EVA
IX. ROLANDO LOOKS FOR EVA

PART THREE: DISINTEGRATION
X. FACUNDO AT SAN JAVIER
XI. LEOPOLDO’S GRANDMOTHER GIVES ADVICE
XII. LEOPOLDO & ANTONIO AT JULIO’S PARTY
XIII. EVA ALONG VICTOR EMILIO ESTRADA
XIV. ROLANDO FINDS EVA

PART FOUR: FACUNDO SAYS FAREWELL
XV. FACUNDO SAYS FAREWELL
XVI. ANTONIO EDITS HIS BABY CHRIST MEMOIR
XVII.THE NIGHT BEFORE ALMA’S FIRST VOICE OF WITNESS INTERVIEW

Editorial Reviews

This debut novel, 12 years in the writing, is a welcome example of how fiction can have urgency, how it's still one of the greatest forms for tackling the incommensurable…This is an original, insubordinate novel…but fabulously, compellingly readable, with endearing characters…

The New York Times Book Review - Valerie Miles

Praise for The Revolutionaries Try Again

“An original, insubordinate novel, like [Cardenas's] grammar, like his syntax, but fabulously, compellingly readable.” —The New York Times Sunday Book Review

“Cardenas’s gift is to show, through long, brilliant sentences, the charm of inaction and delinquency.” —The New Yorker

“A novel that redefines the Latin American identity in a world characterized by social technology and ever-blurring ethnic boundaries.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“Exuberant, cacophonous.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“This is double-black-diamond high modernism, so do some warm-up stretches before you crack this baby.” —Shelf Awareness

“Both ambitious and irreverent, its language as suffused with childhood jest as with profound, urgent questions of purpose.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“A high-octane, high-modernist debut novel from the gifted, fleet Mauro Javier Cardenas.” —Harper’s

“The Revolutionaries Try Again could be spun as the The Recognitions of our age, with Otto reborn as Antonio. In any case, it’s revolutionary.” —Culture Trip

“Experimental, funny, many tongued.” —Brooklyn Magazine

“A remarkable achievement; Cardenas’ expansive voice and vision are too brilliant to let pass you by.” —BuzzFeed

“[Cardenas is] a tremendously skilled storyteller and monologuist; his writing is so exuberant.” —Paul Yamazaki

“It’s been ten years since a book this alive, this incandescent, has fallen into my hands.” —Carmen Boullosa

From the Publisher

2016-06-22
Debut author Cardenas explores youthful idealism, friendship, and the legacy of corruption in this novel set in Ecuador.Leopoldo Hurtado calls his childhood friend Antonio in California and persuades him to return home to Ecuador after a 10-year absence. As classmates at the elite San Javier school, they'd believed themselves responsible for the country's future. Influenced by a radical priest who demanded "How are we to be Christians in a world of destitution and injustice?" they catechized the poor and visited the dying. But corruption and instability abound, and the immoral lifestyle of their rich classmate Julio holds an undeniable appeal. Antonio displays a weakness for expensive clothes he can't afford, leading to rumors at Stanford that he's a dictator's son. Will Leopoldo and Antonio run for office, saving Ecuador from corrupt oligarchs? Or will despair, and their own moral failings, prove too great? Connecting threads follow their poor former classmate Rolando who now runs a radio show, his girlfriend, Eva, and his sister, Alma, who embarks on a harrowing journey to the U.S. after Julio attempts to rape her. Cardenas leavens his material with sly humor and references to everything from Neruda and Julio Cortazar to ABBA and The Exorcist. The friends play a made-up game called Who's Most Pedantic? Leopoldo wonders if the Jesuits built rooms with high ceilings "so that when the time came for the old and the infirm to die the priests could direct them to the vast pointlessness of the lord above?" A statue of the Christ child weeps real tears. Writing sometimes in sentences that stretch for pages, sometimes in fragmented stream-of-consciousness, even briefly in Spanish, Cardenas displays an ambitious intelligence that eschews easy answers. His inclusive sympathy is balanced by an unsparing eye. By the end, Antonio questions his own motives for returning, asking himself "how are we to be humans in a world of destitution and injustice."A strong debut written with nuance and authority.

Kirkus Reviews