RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books... a psychological, dystopian novel with a quiet unease ... Despite its potentially dramatic premise, Ornamental is a work of subtlety and restraint, in which almost every conflict is heard second hand, and if then, only briefly considered. Lizzie Davis compares the novel to a work of architecture in her translator’s note. Given the novel’s high narrative distance, the comparison seems especially apt; Ornamental is born in part out of an aesthetic contrast between frenetic surrealism and clinical minimalism, not unlike the contrast between the bright splashes of color and blockish houses which they cover in Cárdenas’s home country of Colombia ... What makes Ornamental so deeply affecting, however, is not that its pages come together to form a beautiful work of exterior art — though it does — but its ability to cast unease on our interior worlds. Cárdenas is an art critic as well as a novelist, and his exploration of the nature of criticism and artistic interpretation lend Ornamental its eerie power ... a very unusual work of minimalist prose, gesturing toward the universality of absence rather than particular universal constructs ... Brilliantly executed and cleverly translated, Ornamental leaves us with a fresh understanding of the creation of art and the nature of meaning-making. Davis’s translator’s note leaves us with the question, \'How do we look and listen from now on?\' and I can honestly say, I haven’t the slightest idea — this novel has knocked me off my feet.
