American Abductions
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Torrential and dreamlike, Mauro Javier Cárdenas’ novel unfurls into a layered, poignant, and unflinching portrait of how family separations have impacted the minds of Latin American deportees in a technology-bound 21st century.
American Abductions opens in a near-future United States whose omnipresence of data-harvesting and algorithms has enabled the mass incarceration and deportation of Latin Americans—regardless of citizenship. After their father is abducted by immigration officials before their eyes and deported to Colombia, Ada and her sister Eva are left to contend with a United States as all-seeing as it is hostile. Now adults, Ada remains in San Francisco while Eva has joined their father in Colombia, tending him in his ailing health. When his condition worsens, Eva asks Ada to come see them: a nearly impossible feat, given the United States’ restrictions on Latin Americans’ movements. Ada, terribly alone, must come to terms with the violence of American society and the grief of lost community. Exploring the role of technology, mass society, and American expectations on how Latin American deportees should tell their stories, the novel delves into the ties, memories, and lines of code binding communities together.
Mauro Javier Cárdenas has been lauded as one of the most promising Latin American authors, and in American Abductions, his deconstruction of American society and the surveillance state proves his generation-defining acuity and storytelling. The book’s polyphony of mysticism, technology, and philosophy calls to mind the perceptive dystopian visions of Philip K. Dick and the visionary stylistic fluidity of Samuel Delany. The result is a sharp and metaphysical narrative, a masterwork examining the place of Latin Americans in a United States that is always changing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the intriguing and discursive latest from Cardenas (Aphasia), a U.S. president referred to as the Racist in Chief oversees a nightmarish program of covert abductions and deportations of American citizens who have roots in Latin America. The single-sentence chapters, which rarely run for more than a few pages, primarily follow three members of a family scattered across Colombia and the U.S. Antonio, the father, lives in his native Bogota after his abduction several years earlier. He devotes his days to collecting stories of other abductions for the novel he plans to write, and communicates regularly with his daughters, Ada, an architect based in California, and Eva, an artist living in Colombia. As Antonio reflects on his relationship with his daughters and records stories of the abducted, Cardenas interweaves myriad literary allusions, including to the protagonist of W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, to whom one of the abductees compares herself ("I was four and a half years old when I entered the foster office space for abducted children, Aura says, the same age as Jacques Austerlitz when he arrives at the Liverpool Street Station in 1939"). As Antonio toils, Cardenas succeeds at conveying how literature can be used to decode even the most absurd narratives. This multilayered tale pays off with dividends.
