False War - by Carlos Manuel Álvarez (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

An ambitious, panoptic novel about exile as both condition and state of being by a major young Cuban writer

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.

Review Quotes

"Cuban writer Álvarez (The Fallen) constructs a mesmerizing novel out of vignettes featuring characters who left Castro's Cuba only to experience more dispossession and indignity."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Carlos Manuel Álvarez's second novel is a hugely rewarding, polyphonic narrative of migration from Cuba. Through its characters' rich and eccentric interior worlds, it gives articulation to people whose lives are often reduced to stereotypes and offers a new vision of migration...False War is a rich and capacious novel that has much to say about our contemporary moment."--Arin Keeble, The Guardian

"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

"The dissidents, migrants, and exiles of False War travel the world in search of some kind of refuge, but the cities they arrive in are places of purgatory, allegorical waystations of the permanently displaced, where everyone is an outsider, caught between landfalls, hurrying nowhere: 'Brightness inside, darkness outside--until we crash.' This is a timeless and urgent work, in turns lyrical, hardboiled, tender, fragmented. It maps a way forward for the twenty-first century novel."--Jeet Thayil, author of Names of the Women

"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

"Human displacement is the storm surge of our century, yet we only hear of the crest. Behind that swell rush the sequels of individual souls on the move, swirling, unravelling, adrift. Álvarez reels us into those milieus with such engaging detail we can't help becoming comrades to his fugitives. A brilliant work of enchantingly real voices."--DBC Pierre, author of Meanwhile in Dopamine City

"This swirl of stories felt to me like a blue-collar version of Bolaño's The Savage Detectives. Instead of poets, the drifting young people of False War seem like a chorus of the dispossessed, ordinary lives portrayed with extraordinary intensity. It's an incredibly poignant novel, and Álvarez is a writer who deserves a much wider audience in the English-speaking world."--Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears

"Carlos Manuel Álvarez is a tremendously exciting and engaged writer, and his fiction and essays never stray far from the world."--Literary Hub

"Reading False War is like visiting a gallery of wounded souls, whose wounds are not entirely intelligible and thus can only be partially portrayed. Álvarez's prose, in Wimmer's translation, dances a "false war" between languages amid the characters' internal conflicts...Wimmer brilliantly conveys this complexity by transliterating some of Fanboy's Spanglish while leaving other elements untranslated."--Mandy Suzanne Wong, Necessary Fiction

About the Author

Carlos Manuel Álvarez is the author of The Tribe and The Fallen. He has been included in Granta's "Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists" as well as Bogotá39's best Latin American writers under 40. He lives in New York City.

Natasha Wimmer is the translator of nine books by Roberto Bolaño, including The Savage Detectives and 2666. Her recent translations include Nona Fernández's Voyager and Álvaro Enrigue's You Dreamed of Empires.