. . . no, Antonio says to his daughters during dinner, Americans can’t imagine the conditions, and if they can’t imagine the conditions, they can’t imagine themselves as refugees, and if they can’t imagine themselves as refugees, they will conclude that refugees are different from them, a different species, Eva says, they read in the news that a different species from Central America have to flee their homes and that they’re coming here, and that we’re abducting their children to teach them a lesson, life is hard and then we die, Ada says. . .
There is something distinctly unsettling about reading the latest novel by Ecuadorian-American writer Mauro Javier Cárdenas on the eve of Trump’s second term—Racist in Chief, anyone?—especially with tech billionaire Elon Musk on his arm assuming they haven’t broken up by then. Projected into a future that now seems shockingly close, American Abductions envisions a US in which the mass deportation of Latin American migrants, not just those who are illegal but naturalized citizens and sometimes even their children, is a large scale, technologically advanced, industrialized, and profit motivated operation. It consumes the waking and sleeping hours of its unfortunate targets and tears their lives apart in distinct yet similar ways. Antonio, the divorced cubicle-bound data analyst hero of Cárdenas’s last novel, Aphasia, who was trying to write a novel while juggling commitments to his ex, his daughters, his mother and sister, plus a couple of girlfriends, has, in this scenario, been abducted and deported to his native Colombia. He was driving the girls to school when immigration officials apprehended him, a scene recorded by Ada, his eldest, on a video that subsequently went viral. When we catch up with him, decades have passed and his health is failing (he will die but continues to appear in recollected scenes from the past or via recordings of the many interviews he conducted with fellow deportees over the years). His daughters are grown. His youngest, Eva, a conceptual artist, joined him in Bogota after finishing university and has been there for seven years, while Ada has remained in San Francisco where she works as an architect. Add to this a varied cast of Latin American exiles and their families connected through either Antonio’s ongoing interview project and /or the lucid dream workshops of an online doctor, and you have the basic sketch of this dynamic and original work.
Cárdenas is a passionate devotee of the long sentence, producing multi-page strings of thoughts, reflections, and dialogue that tend to shift mid-stream—watch those commas, those “he says,” or “she thinks”—demanding attention while providing ample room for humour, recurring themes, and often biting commentary. But he is not simply obsessed with word count, an objective that in itself can lead to the proliferation of hopelessly unnecessary, redundant clauses. Rather, his sentences seem to propel themselves with an intrinsic energy that never overstays its welcome. There was, he admits in an interview for Minor Literature[s], a method guiding the writing of this book:
I wrote every sentence in American Abductions the same way. I started each sentence with a human impulse that I attempted to exhaust within the same sentence. This attempt to exhaust could be called In Search of Unexpected Linkages, with the caveat that this doesn’t translate to anything goes since the human impulse at the beginning determines the radius of operations. This approach also doesn’t allow for me adding a reference or an image three months later because that would disturb the progression of the sentence, which is based on the linkages previously generated. I typically spend one week on a 1,000-word sentence. Every day during that one week I read the sentence from the beginning so that I can ground myself on the opening impulse and what has already been generated. During that one week I have to read widely and wildly but in the vicinity of the radius of operations, which is as vague as it sounds — more Ouija board than research — though obviously I also do primary research (you would be surprised by how many facts are included in the opening sentence, for instance).
If that sounds like a recipe for a forced and artificial exercise it is anything but. This is a serious, albeit futuristic, novel that is unafraid to tilt at uncomfortable truths. There are continuing and developing threads and characters, whose stories reflect the fear, isolation, and (quite literal) dreams of those directly impacted by the anti-Latin American agenda of the “Pale Americans.” Central to this are, of course, Eva and Ada who are not only deprived of their rather eccentric father at a young age, but are unable to be together when he is sick or after his death, as they decide to continue his work. But there are other strained or separated families as well.
The subject matter—especially in light of the increasing antipathy and hostility toward immigrants in the Global North—may be grim, but this is a playful, absurdist novel nonetheless. Curious data and scientific facts are woven in to the narrative and literary references abound, some direct, such as the discussion of texts by Leonora Carrington, Bernhard, Borges, and Sebald; others less so, such as the adoption of the names of authors, musicians, artists, and Bolaño characters as intentional pseudonyms or nicknames for intelligent technologies. Sentence by sentence, each chapter builds on those that proceed it to create an intelligent, entertaining and, dare we say it, unnervingly prophetic novel.
American Abductions by Mauro Javier Cárdenas is published by Dalkey Archive Press. An excerpt can be found at Minor Literature[s].
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