A Millions Most-Anticipated Book of 2024
"Mauro Javier Cáaacute;rdenas has knocked down the novel as we know it, and built a cathedral out of the debris." -Carlos Fonseca
“Cárdenas's narrative engines include oneiric séeacute;ances, unheralded victims rebaptized as 20th-century Surrealists, a plausible robot named Roberto Bolañntilde;o, and lives fractured by trauma, death or computer algorithms… Cárdenas reminds us that Surrealism also had a social ethos, to destabilize ruinous order through art. Similarly, this is what American Abductions offers: the art-polemic as a defiant, befitting medium for our dire times.” —Gina Apostol, The New York Times
"One of the most affecting and inventive English-language novels in recent memory, a playful and experimental narrative about narratives in which the question of who is telling the story — and how they go about doing it — proves the real subject." —Robert Rubsam, The Washington Post
“Cárdenas writes with both playfulness and erudition. The long, looping sentences brim with references to writers and surrealists, as well as with rage and dark humor. His concern is less with individual stories, and more with the effects of fear and trauma on an entire population. A dark, original work.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“Mauro Javier Cárdenas can maunder with the best. The syntax in his first novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again (2016), shuttled between telegraphic and garrulous, but his next, Aphasia (2021), sank into pillowy heaps of rhetoric like those in the new American Abductions… Yet, while his novels to date dazzle with verbal pyrotechnics, they also set off deeper disturbances.” —John Domini, The Brooklyn Rail
“Plagued by data harvesting, constant surveillance, mass deportation, and incarceration, the society at the heart of Cárdenas’s new novel is less speculative dystopia than realist reflection. Channeling Philip K. Dick and Samuel Delany, Cárdenas imagines a society where Latin Americans are systematically expunged… American Abductions tells a new kind of immigrant story, suffused with mysticism and philosophical rigor.” —Daniella Fishman, The Millions
"Cárdenas incorporates multiple references to and discussions of his artistic touchstones, such as the writer Roberto Bolaño and the composer Olivier Messiaen; these allusions speak to the foundations of the novel’s form. But the style of American Abductions is about more than simply shooting off modernist fireworks. Cárdenas is saying something important about how trauma is shared, and mediated, across generations... Cárdenas’s novel shows us that reckoning with the future is just as important as reckoning with the past. Indeed, both actions require impressive feats of imagination, empathy, and courage.” —Wilson McBee, Southwest Review
