American abductions A novel

In the intriguing and discursive latest from Cardenas (Aphasia), a U.S. president referred to as the Racist in Chief oversees a nightmarish program of covert abductions and deportations of American citizens who have roots in Latin America. The single-sentence chapters, which rarely run for more than a few pages, primarily follow three members of a family scattered across Colombia and the U.S. Antonio, the father, lives in his native Bogota after his abduction several years earlier. He devotes his days to collecting stories of other abductions for the novel he plans to write, and communicates regularly with his daughters, Ada, an architect based in California, and Eva, an artist living in Colombia. As Antonio reflects on his relationship with his daughters and records stories of the abducted, Cardenas interweaves myriad literary allusions, including to the protagonist of W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, to whom one of the abductees compares herself ("I was four and a half years old when I entered the foster office space for abducted children, Aura says, the same age as Jacques Austerlitz when he arrives at the Liverpool Street Station in 1939"). As Antonio toils, Cardenas succeeds at conveying how literature can be used to decode even the most absurd narratives. This multilayered tale pays off with dividends. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, Wylie Agency. (May)

Ecuadorian writer Cárdenas contemplates a dystopian future for Latin Americans in the U.S. Ada, an architect, carries the childhood trauma of her father Antonio's unexpected deportation. A U.S. citizen born in Colombia, he was abducted while driving her and her younger sister to school in San Francisco; in the grim and eerily familiar near future of the novel, immigration status is meaningless. The Racist in Chief demonizes all Latin Americans; they're surveilled and in constant danger of abduction, incarceration in governmental detention centers, and deportation. As Antonio explains, "Americans can't imagine the conditions, and if they can't imagine the conditions, they can't imagine themselves as refugees, and if they can't imagine themselves as refugees, they will conclude that refugees are different from them, a different species...." Ada's sister, Eva, an installation artist, has moved to Bogotá to join their father. When he's hospitalized, the sisters continue his work interviewing Latin American abductees around the globe. These interviews and the voices of participants in a dream forum serve as a sort of Greek chorus: "I imagined being part of a collective mind, the mind of all of us who have been deported and whose family members have been abducted, a mind like a sea struck by a meteor, a sea that ceases to be blue or green as it overtakes the continents, the fish turning into lizards and the lizards into birds with gills, a sea that is no longer the sea but a carnival of destruction and a cemetery and a neighborhood where I might run into you, Antonio...." 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.