I’m judging a 2020 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory
glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

Beautiful writing.... interesting novel.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for the Reader's Copy!

Now available.

In his second novel, "Aphasia", Mauro Javier Cardenas stretches the limits of narrative form. Aphasia, as I once learned in medical school, is a cognitive disorder where the patient can't express themselves properly. It can be one of the signs of psychosis, a prominent part of psychotic disorders like schizophrenia, which is what Antonio's sister has been diagnosed with. It's told in a series of short monologues of run-on sentences. While certain sections dragged on, I found myself still thoroughly engaged in Antonio's story, his journey as an immigrant from Bogota, his many affairs with young women as a sugar daddy, even the mundane daily tasks as an SQL corporate worker. Most interesting were the parts where his sister made an appearance. In a way, Cardenas is questioning what it means to have a plot, to have character, to have all those things that we are taught in craft seminars and what it means to tell a meaningful story. Overall, I found this book intriguing and experimental.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on November 3, 2020

Aphasia consists of a handful of sentences. The sentences roam and meander for pages before marching to a halt. To his credit, Mauro Javier Cárdenas breaks up the sentences with commas and dashes and parentheticals so that, with a bit of concentration, it’s possible to follow them to the end. Aphasia isn’t Ulysses. Still, the style makes Aphasia a challenge to read. Readers who admire “page turners” with short sentences and five paragraph chapters — techniques that create the illusion of a fast-moving plot by giving the reader little content to test their attention spans — might detest Aphasia.

Antonio is a reader. Antonio's narrative makes reference to various works of literature, often drawing parallels to his own life. Antonio has two daughters and an ex-wife. He works as a database analyst for an insurance company. He thinks of himself as playing at that job while he writes a novel. For twelve years, Antonio has spent his free time working on a novel that is set in Bogotá. To that end he interviews and records his mother, Leonora, both to get information about family history and to find a voice in which to tell the story.

Much of Aphasia consists of transcribed or recalled conversations and Antonio’s editorial asides. In addition to conversations with Leonora, we read about Antonio’s conversations with his ex-wife Ida (who tells Antonio stories about her Czech parents) and his sister Estela. Antonio learns from them that his father sexually abused his sister and a stepdaughter, but Estela insists that their mother sexually abused Antonio. Since Estela suffers from a serious mental illness, it is difficult to separate her delusions from reality, although the illness appears to have developed later in her life, after she finished college. Leonora, however, believes that her husband abused Estela because she has heard stories about incestuous behavior within his family. Where the truth lies is something of a mystery to Antonio and the reader.

In any event, Antonio feels pained about his role in having his sister institutionalized. Later, after her release, Estela faces criminal charges for an incident with a knife and fears deportation — yet another source of anxiety for Antonio. He also has reservations about his dating site hookups, particularly when his neighbors lodge noise complaints that anger his ex-wife.

To what do these long sentences add up? By the end, Aphasia reads as a domestic drama told from Antonio’s ambivalent point of view. The novel’s title refers to (in Antonio’s words) “inability to comprehend and form language because of a dysfunction in specific brain regions” but Antonio tells us that it is also a metaphor for excessive paralysis, an apt description of Antonio’s life. The one lesson that Antonio internalizes from the people he’s talked to is that no matter how you live your life, it slips away. You need to figure out what you want to do and do it before it’s lights out. It’s always good to be reminded of that, although it’s a fairly common theme.

I’m not sure why Cárdenas’ settled on this writing style — run-on sentences that go on for pages. I assume he was trying to make a point but I struggled to grasp it. Life is challenging and so is my writing?

Is Aphasia worth the challenge? Some aspects of the novel, including recollections of life in Columbia and Czechia, are interesting, as is Estela’s paranoia about her family and Barack Obama. But Antonio isn’t very interesting. I’m not usually thrilled with novels by writers who write about being writers, while Antonio’s observations about more substantial literary figures add little to the story. The novel peters out without resolving any of the storylines in Antonio’s present and it’s never clear that he learned the full story of his parents’ past. In the end, this novel of Antonio’s ambivalence left me ambivalent.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

I need to admit I wanted to first read it because of its cover, which might sound shallow, sorry not sorry.
I'm afraid this is more ambitious and experimental than interesting, for me. Antonio, the main character, writes about himself in the third person which makes the novel a bit difficult to read at times, especially since he writes in big chunks of stream of consciousness prose. It could be engaging on some intellectual level, however I felt it tries too hard, and it ends up being a bit flat.

Thanks to the publisher for the arc.

Deep and surprising, this is a short book with a strong punch. It tackles family, memory, who we are and who we thought we may be.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. Antonio, who grew up in Columbia with his sister, his mother and his abusive father, is now living in Los Angeles, next door to his ex wife and two young daughters. Antonio is trying to do anything he can to try and distract himself from his sister, who now lives in Baltimore and is getting in more and more trouble as her schizophrenia gets worse. But instead of dealing with her, Antonio is listening to recordings of his mother, his ex wife and ex girlfriends in order to write a novel about them. He is also taken up playing soccer twice a week, even though it’s tearing apart his body, trying to distract himself with novels that have characters going through mental illness and also seeing escorts through an app that may get him in trouble. But with all these distractions, he can’t avoid dealing with his sister forever.

Interesting plot but this book is a stream-of-consciousness writing style that doesn't work with me. I could hardly finish it. I mostly skimmed the majority of it. Don't waste your time. It give you a pounding headache.

Release date: November 3, 2020

This novel is extremely exhilarating to read, and if you approach it in good faith you'll nevertheless find yourself a little breathless with trying to keep up, but you'll also feel full of wonder, and you'll also wonder when the period is coming, but hang in there, because it's an extraordinary read, especially if you remain alert and ready for the next revelation when some new thought comes rolling along (although admittedly it's hard, sometimes, to know what to think, because the thoughts keep coming at such a pace that you're already thinking about the next thought before your done thinking about the last one) for instance here I am rereading the first paragraph in a chapter entitled "DORA & HER DOG BY ANTONIO JOE JIMÉNEZ and the chapter has thrust me without warning into a conversation that has much to do with what we are willing to sacrifice for those we love, but then suddenly off it flies into a brand new and yet completely relevant metafictional observation about the verb "to sob"-- and somebody says: 'in my own so-called fiction I skirt the verb to sob because of its melodramatic acoustics--' and isn't it true? that "to sob' has melodramatic acoustics? -- Now I'm going to think so forever. I'll never write the verb 'to sob' again. 'to weep,' maybe. But what was I just thinking about? And the fluttering revelatory inspirations keep coming one after another and the words rush by until the end. I suppose I could have read slower. But it felt wrong to. I'm happy to have read it. I'm sorry it's over. I'll be reading it again.

*I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.*

I gave this book 2 stars.

I was not able to finish reading this book, partly because of the writing style and partially for the format sent.

My personal perception is that this author has read and loved Jose Saramago, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Efraim Medina Reyes and Charles Bukowsky. All of them have different styles, but I found their influence in the style. However, what they did was unique and extremely difficult to portray unless you, of course, are themselves. When a writing style seems to have no rules is when the writer has been more careful to make themselves understood. It is like anarchy; there are careful rules in it, even though there is no hierarchy.

The first part of the book has a leitmotiv, which I completely lost upon starting the second part. Shamefully, I could not continue reading, so I ignore if either the title or this thread make sense later in the story.

The book was titled Aphasia, which is a language disorder consisting on either not being able to produce language in a way others understand or not understanding input received through language. Up to where I stopped, it has more to do with other language disorders that are not related to this one from the style.

Having paragraphs which are beetween one and 3 pages long and no standard punctuation adds up to the hardship I felt while trying to make sense of the story.

All these features produce a flat tone. This is a problem to me because I believe the best thing about reading and what allows you to live through the story is precisely imagining the voice and tone of each character, which cannot be found here.

Nevertheless, the spoken and casual tone about everyday aspects, stating them as they regularly spring to mind, without trying to teach you anything caught my attention. Quite a Bukowskian characteristic.

Thank you so much to net galley for sending me a copy of this book. I didn’t know what to expect going into when I read this book but I fee in love with it

I enjoyed the book myself but don’t believe I will be recommending it for my students. Some of the subject matter and the general level of accessibility would not work for my group of students.