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
- “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
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
- “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
- “A new Latin American literature is here: With precocious mastery of a paragon of narrative resources and an overwhelming sensibility, Carlos Manuel Álvarez portrays the only identity that truly matters—not the national one, but the human one.”—Emiliano Monge, author of What Goes Unsaid
- “I was blown away by this novel. Nothing in the story is reducible. Its formal ambition is met by its execution, and the effect is staggering. Álvarez is an immense writer, a generational talent, and this, for me, is a generation-defining work.”—Michael Magee, author of Close to Home
- “This is a timeless and urgent work, in turns lyrical, hard-boiled, tender, fragmented. It maps a way forward for the twenty-first-century novel.”—Jeet Thayil, author of Names of the Women
