Keynote
An ambitious, panoptic novel about exile as both condition and state of being by a major young Cuban writer
Book Title
False War
Subtitle
A Novel
Cover Image
“One of the pleasures of the novel is how it turns you around, blurs the edges of things, plays tricks on your memory. Another is its elegant, compressed style….False War, in this translation by Natasha Wimmer, has a mood all its own: playful, irreverent, sardonic — and angry.”—Charlie Lee, New York Times
Body
The characters in False War are ambivalent castaways living lives of deep estrangement from their home country, stranded in an existential no-man’s land. Some of them want to leave and can’t, others do leave but never quite get anywhere.
In this multivoiced novel, employing a dazzling range of narrative styles from noir to autofiction, Carlos Manuel Álvarez brings together the stories of many people from all walks of life through a series of interconnected daisy chains. From Havana to Mexico City to Miami, from New York to Paris to Berlin, whether toiling in a barber shop, roaring in Yankee Stadium, lost in the Louvre, intensely competing in a chess hall in Cuba, plotting a theft, or on a junket for émigré dissidents in Berlin, these characters learn that while they may seem to be on the move, in reality they are paralyzed, immersed in a fake war waged with little real passion.
The fractured narrative, filled with extraordinary portraits of ordinary people, reflects the disintegration that comes from being uprooted. At the same time it is full of tenderness, moments of joy and profound release. False War confirms Carlos Manuel Álvarez as one of the indispensable voices of his generation in Latin American letters.
In this multivoiced novel, employing a dazzling range of narrative styles from noir to autofiction, Carlos Manuel Álvarez brings together the stories of many people from all walks of life through a series of interconnected daisy chains. From Havana to Mexico City to Miami, from New York to Paris to Berlin, whether toiling in a barber shop, roaring in Yankee Stadium, lost in the Louvre, intensely competing in a chess hall in Cuba, plotting a theft, or on a junket for émigré dissidents in Berlin, these characters learn that while they may seem to be on the move, in reality they are paralyzed, immersed in a fake war waged with little real passion.
The fractured narrative, filled with extraordinary portraits of ordinary people, reflects the disintegration that comes from being uprooted. At the same time it is full of tenderness, moments of joy and profound release. False War confirms Carlos Manuel Álvarez as one of the indispensable voices of his generation in Latin American letters.
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About the Author
Credit: Ángel Soto
Praise
“The collective isolation captured in False War is told via nearly two dozen voices desperate for some sort of comfort or compassion…But human lives can’t be erased. They can be despised, they can be ignored, they can be forgotten. They can be isolated, discounted, and given up on, but they can’t be wiped away.”—Cory Oldweiler, Words Without Borders
- “Like a blue-collar version of Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. . . . [False War] is an incredibly poignant novel, and Álvarez is a writer who deserves a much wider audience in the English-speaking world.”—Hari Kunzru
- “No matter how fractured you feel, no matter if you’re standing in the Louvre while your mind is in Havana, no matter if you’re stuck in Havana and dreaming of Berlin—your body is whole. Your body moves, it holds you, and it is whole. False War is written with this same sense of containing the uncontainable, for perhaps the only space beyond the human body that can bear so many fractures is the book, which exists to cohere—even if just temporarily—the infinite fragments of our indeterminate, unsettled reality. Brave, inconsolable book.”—Xiao Yue Shan, Asymptote
- “What happens when exile becomes style, and style becomes a kind of home? False War is that question asked with tenderness, fury, and precision.”—Carlos Fonseca, author of Austral
