This bombardment of multiple layers of thought and emotion is exactly what it feels like to read Aphasia by Mauro Javier Cárdenas ... The novel is formally daunting when you first get going with it. I’ll admit it takes a second to realize you are in fact reading the rhizomatic architecture of thought itself. Once you get going, though, it’s a rollercoaster of a run ... The light speed at which this book careens forward can make it difficult to see where the narrator is taking us, but it’s a worthy journey and universal themes emerge ... It’s the as it’s happening narration style that makes Cárdenas’s new work so innovative and exciting to read. It takes one of the oldest adages about the novel and spins it anew: novels help us understand what it’s like to be inside someone’s head.
... one of the most striking things in this book is the way that its protagonist simultaneously exists in so many different versions of time, as in he is almost thinking of or writing about some other time than the time he currently inhabits, he is a person almost entirely devoid of the present, as he himself (Antonio Jose Jiménez) several times confesses that nothing in the present is able to touch him or is real for him, and yet the novel is so invested in its own relationship to time that it arranges itself along a series of at-first mysterious signifiers ... there is nothing saintly about Antonio except his almost religious desire to understand at the same time as he erases or tries to erase certain memories even as he tries to regain them, this desire to make some sense of what has happened to his family, what has happened to his life, all the while portrayed so elegiacally, shot through with mercurial beauty and enormous stylistic ambition in this novel, Aphasia , the life of a writer’s mind.
Cárdenas might be said to be writing in streams of consciousness (note the plural), in which threads are woven in an often-dazzling performance akin to a DJ’s mashup, in which two different songs can be heard separately as well as together ... As he revisits the events of his life, Antonio interrupts himself with asides, questions, and literary references, which are themselves beset by further intrusions. The result is a fragmented narrative marked by the liberal use of em dashes and parentheses, the latter used to capture this nesting-doll effect of thoughts embedded within thoughts embedded within thoughts ... An irony of this style is that as it seeks to portray a mind frazzled by emotional stress, it demands nothing less than the complete focus of the reader. Fail to notice a reference to a film Antonio mentions having watched recently, for example, and you will be at a loss when, a couple of pages later, Antonio summons the protagonist of that film in making a comparison to his own life.
... a fast-paced, vibrant setting, written in colloquial language and symbolized by airports, movie theaters and malls ... He writes in English, but Aphasia uses occasional Spanish, and its spirit is one of blending and border collapse ... This mixing of space and time is, astonishingly, neither confusing nor frustrating to read. Rather, it feels familiar ... It also echoes the deeper divide of existing between countries, establishing roots in a new place while tending to connections in an old one ... Aphasia is a novelistic portrait of the internet’s ability to help us elide geographical and personal borders. It dramatizes our growing ability to occupy multiple narratives at once — and proves that literature itself can do the same.
Reading the boldly inventive and fast paced novel Aphasia , is like road tripping through a warm country with your smartest friend; it might be one of the best trips you are likely to take this year ... The distinctive voice of Cardenas, (a native of Ecuador) has hints of Roberto Bolaño with his vivid reportage, but also the sexy worldliness of a Geoff Dyer. Aphasia shares this quality of being formally experimental, (there is no marked dialogue though many strands of dialogue intertwine) while also holding the reader in emotional suspense ... Playful in many ways, Cardena’s narrator shifts and travels ... The skillful way Cardenas slides from vivid image-to-image, and event to event, as if it were the most natural thing in the world creates a kind of relentless momentum that carries the reader from start to finish without pausing. There is rarely a boring scene here. We feel the density, urgency, and the complexity of lived life.
Antonio claims he believes he doesn’t know so that he can feel less 'programmed,' (the language already computerized, as throughout the novel), but what is conveyed by Cárdenas’s tumbling free indirect discourse is just the opposite: that Antonio actually feels himself pre-destined by the traumas he’s undergone ... it is the silences and circumnavigations that are most glaring ... two novels smashed into one bifurcate tree ... What is their relation to each other? Why mash up his sister’s schizophrenia and his affairs? ... Perhaps the most striking feature of Cárdenas’s prose is the length of his sentences. Cárdenas writes marathonic, interruptive, recursive sentences animated by what he refers to as an 'impulse' ... the aim of Aphasia and its deranged sentences is to make the reader constantly aware of the speaker’s awareness of their presence, and of the narrative manipulations that ensue.
Divided into five sections of short chapters, the story unfolds in a fragmented, fractured style, the long, breathless sentences dizzying and richly packed with memories, connections, and literary references. Cárdenas undercuts the idea of a single, stable identity and suggests the self as a many-layered work in progress ... Fans of the author's inventive, ambitious debut novel will find the same sardonic intelligence, paired here with a deep humanity ... Original, richly felt, deftly written. Highly recommended.
Cárdenas follows up his wild and intelligent The Revolutionaries Try Again with an exercise in extreme navel-gazing ... Few if any of these potentially intriguing plotlines are resolved, leaving the reader with what feels like notes toward a novel. Cárdenas’s literary experiment never quite coheres.
