PanThe RumpusHis debut novel resists you with every page. Reading it feels like being dropped in the middle of an inside joke told by people you don’t know, who never give you the setup so you can’t understand the references. It’s uncomfortable and disorienting; it’s easy to walk away...And yet, if you allow the words to wash over you so you can experience the creativity and boldness of the author’s narrative styles, the novel occasionally has a jolting and refreshing effect—moments where the ponderous style of the book matches the theme: young, idealistic motivation slowly being killed ... Paragraphs and sentences in this novel can run for several pages. Chapters are sometimes written completely in Spanish. Nicknames are used before their associations and meanings are revealed. The rug is constantly pulled from under us; we are made to feel unsafe ... Despite the fun Cardenas is clearly having in setting up stylistic hurtles, the work comes off as cold. I found myself yearning for a little straightforward realism and character development at times. The Revolutionaries Try Again becomes tiresome in its attempts to be as iconoclastic as possible. In this sense it seems more related to the later novels of Elfriede Jelinek, which throw everything at the page in the hope that the reader can divine something, than the work of Roberto Bolaño, Javier Marías, or Julio Cortázar, to whom Cardenas has been compared.
Daniel Saldaña París, Trans. by Christina MacSweeney
PositiveThe RumpusClearly this is an ambitious fictional project. But Saldaña París is most convincing when he writes about the interiority of the mind, when he allows for first person narration, than when he writes at a distance, seeing these characters’ worlds in third person. The 'I' of Rodrigo proves amusing in his ennui, a decent man stuck in his own mind. The third person narrated sections require more of a balance in exposition, action, interiority, and analysis.
