Aphasia /

In the follow-up to his wildly ambitious debut novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again (2016), Cárdenas again deploys his sense of invention and irreverence, jettisoning conventional paragraph and dialogue breaks and embracing long-running sentences that delight in playful exasperation. The narrator, Antonio, finds himself stuck inside a life he never imagined, plugging away at an unglamourous IT job, not only divorced but also estranged from his wife, who has fled the U.S. for her native Czech Republic with their two children. Obsessed with becoming a better father by watching movies and reading fiction, Antonio also chases sex, if not love, via an online dating site that matches college students with older men. On top of this panoply of entertaining loose ends, Antonio's sister suffers a schizophrenic breakdown, due in no small part to their unfortunate childhood in Bogotá. While readers in search of straightforward narrative and clearly delineated scenes may be frustrated by the nonstop engine of Cárdenas' prose, this quirky, playfully difficult novel will appeal to fans of Latin American fiction that navigates the bleeding edge of experimentation.

Cárdenas follows up his wild and intelligent The Revolutionaries Try Again with an exercise in extreme navel-gazing narrated by Antonio Jose Jiménez, a Colombian immigrant to the U.S. who describes himself as "a moron who allowed himself to be conned by my mother." Antonio's ex-wife has left for the Czech Republic with their two young daughters, spurring Antonio into a long reconsideration of his circumstances. He's an analyst at an insurance company, and lately he's been using a dating website for would-be sugar daddies as a way to meet women. He also has to deal with his mentally ill sister, who is convinced her family is conspiring against her with Barack Obama. But mostly, Antonio reads to keep his mind off of things: Borges, Bruno Schulz, Silvina Ocampo, László Krasznahorkai, and Thomas Bernhard, a cavalcade of writers' writers that leads Antonio to transcribe their sentences and even attempt a style parody here and there. Finally, he hopes to unravel the story of his parents and childhood in Bogotá, but new memories complicate what he thinks he knows of his past. Few if any of these potentially intriguing plotlines are resolved, leaving the reader with what feels like notes toward a novel. Cárdenas's literary experiment never quite coheres. (Nov.)

No longer anxious for his former wife and two beloved daughters to go on their annual summer vacation so that he can recall old girlfriends and cavort with new ones; fretting about sister Estela's mental health issues, which have cost her both job and home; and recalling an abusive family life that damaged his sister especially, Colombian-born American Antonio Jose Jiménez "tries to think about gradations of incoherence in fiction instead of his sister's incoherence in Baltimore." The narrative that results is a wild ride through Antonio's mind, a Molly Bloomesque meditation both dense and lusciously liquid that could have been incoherent indeed were it not for Cárdenas's superb crafting in this follow-up to his debut, The Revolutionaries Try Again. A database analyst at Prudential Investments who aspires to write novels, Antonio graces his monolog with references to classical music, films, and literature from Beckett to László Krasznahorkai in a way that's refreshingly and unobtrusively erudite. (Soccer comes into play, too.) As in life, there's no easy resolution for Antonio's concerns. VERDICT Not for readers wanting straightforward plot, and the book does go on a bit, but language and literature lovers will soak up Cárdenas's original work.

In Ecuadorian Cárdenas' second novel--after The Revolutionaries Try Again (2016)--a once-reluctant father tries to balance family with an awareness of lost possibilities while his sister's life unravels. Antonio Jose Jiménez immigrated to the U.S. from Colombia to fulfill his dream of an Ivy League education. Now a divorced database analyst, he lives in a small apartment connected through a purgatorial laundry room to the apartment he once shared with his wife and two young daughters. Struggling to write in his spare time, he avoids thinking about his sister or his own failed marriage by remembering former girlfriends (one of whom chose "László Krasznahorkai" for their safe word) and having sex with college students he meets on a site called Your Sugar Arrangements. He studies fathers in fiction and movies. "To learn how to be a father from a movie might sound ridiculous…but how else do men learn to be fathers different from their own monstrous fathers?--holotropic breathwork?" Divided into five sections of short chapters, the story unfolds in a fragmented, fractured style, the long, breathless sentences dizzying and richly packed with memories, connections, and literary references. Cárdenas undercuts the idea of a single, stable identity and suggests the self as a many-layered work in progress. On the YSA site, Antonio calls himself Arturo. At work, consumed by thoughts of "the other lives he could have lived if he'd left his former wife when he was planning to, three weeks before conceiving Ada," he imagines different versions of himself, including Antonio I (soccer player), Antonio VIII (writer), and Antonio V (database analyst), who "creates a spreadsheet to tabulate the other Antonios." Meanwhile Antonio's sister has a schizophrenic break brought on in part by their traumatic childhood with an abusive father. Confronted with discomfort, Antonio's brain "activates its emergency erasure mechanisms." A person, he thinks, is "an accretion of misfortunes," aphasia "a metaphor for expressive paralysis." Fans of the author's inventive, ambitious debut novel will find the same sardonic intelligence, paired here with a deep humanity. Despite erasure mechanisms and paralysis, Antonio works to be a better brother, a better parent to his girls. "Everywhere we went I saw grandmothers looking at us and marveling at a world where fathers and daughters held hands." Original, richly felt, deftly written. Highly recommended. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.