The Revolutionaries Try Again
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
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.
Everyone thinks they're the chosen ones, Masha wrote on Antonio's manuscript. See About Schmidt with Jack Nicholson. Then she quoted from Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam, because she was sure Antonio hadn't read her yet: Can a man really be held accountable for his own actions? His behavior, even his character, is always in the merciless grip of the age, which squeezes out of him the drop of good or evil that it needs from him. In San Francisco, besides the accumulation of wealth, what does the age ask of your so called protagonist? No wonder he never returns to Ecuador.
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 Marias, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Juan Villoro, and Antonio Lobo Antunes have appeared in Music & Literature, San Francisco Chronicle, BOMB, and the Quarterly Conversation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cardenas's exuberant, cacophonous debut novel profiles a group of Ecuadorans trying, some harder than others, to change the political situation in their country. Occasionally taxing but always stimulating, the novel is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the country's strong-arm oligarchs, populist rabble-rousers, intellectual elite, and suffering workers. The primary character is Antonio, a Stanford graduate from the Ecuadoran town of Guayaquil who hasn't returned to his native country since leaving 12 years earlier. When an old friend calls him from Ecuador during a period of political upheaval, Antonio, motivated by guilt, nostalgia, and the image of himself "on a white horse returning to solve the problems of transportation, alimentation, lack of sustenation," agrees. Though the characters are nominally concerned with the future of Ecuador, the book is really a journey into the past of Antonio and the gifted high school friends he left behind, a "mafia of nerdos" who demonstrate their affection through constant, often puerile banter. For some, youthful idealism has succumbed to toadyism or apathy; others, outraged by the country's disastrous leadership, are earnestly engaged in "conscientizing the people." The political action tends to take place on the periphery as Cardenas dizzyingly leaps from character to character, from street protests to swanky soirees, and from lengthy uninterrupted interior monologues to rapid-fire dialogues and freewheeling satirical radio programs, resulting in extended passages of brilliance. This inventive novel shares some of the revolutionary spirit of Ecuador's ill-served people, who, as one character puts it, "want to trounce the same old narratives."
