Aphasia
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- 49,99 lei
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- 49,99 lei
Publisher Description
'Monumental, funny, potent, and fresh' Carlos Fonseca, author of Natural History
Antonio is living a double life – and doing a pretty good job of it. By day he's Antonio, mild-mannered database analyst, recent divorcé and father of two. In private, however, he spends hours on seedy pick-up websites or combing fiction and film for the solutions to his problems.
And then, Antonio's sister goes missing.
Her disappearance forces Antonio to confront not only his own troubled past, but his mother's decision to leave Colombia with two young children in tow, his ex-wife's obsessive, unhappy relationship with her homeland and, ultimately, the reason for his sister's despair.
Propulsive and freewheeling, bold and hilarious, Mauro Javier Cárdenas' second novel is a daring examination of identity in a world that seems determined to fragment us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
C rdenas follows up his wild and intelligent The Revolutionaries Try Again with an exercise in extreme navel-gazing narrated by Antonio Jose Jim nez, 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, L szl 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 Bogot , 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. C rdenas's literary experiment never quite coheres.
