AMERICAN ABDUCTIONS, by Mauro Javier Cárdenas
In this brief, intricate novel on deportations of Latin Americans during the regime of a U.S. president called Racist in Chief, Mauro Javier Cárdenas creates what I’ll call an art-polemic — a melding of play with political purpose. From it, the cruelty of American immigration policy emerges: How else to capture such surreal inhumanity other than with the intractable capacities of art?
Multiple interpretations even of the novel’s title, “American Abductions,” occur to the reader: An abduction is a kidnapping. An abduction, as a form of reasoning, is an unproven argument based on observation. An abduction is a paranormal experience. Should the story then be told “dramatically, melodramatically or obliquely?” the daughters of deportees ask in the novel.
Obliquely is the least of it. The abductions here — which separate parents from their children, some left to die, some left to dream of their fathers, many unnamed and disappeared — are uncontainable in straight storytelling. Instead, Cárdenas’s narrative engines include oneiric séances, unheralded victims rebaptized as 20th-century Surrealists, a plausible robot named Roberto Bolaño, and lives fractured by trauma, death or computer algorithms.
The novel proceeds from polyphony: Each chapter is a single long sentence of dialogue without quotation marks, so that at times one has to retread pages looking for attributions. But the central emotional thread — the quiet devastation of familial loss — is simple enough. One story line is an account of phone conversations between a government agent and Elsi, an algebraic topologist and Salvadoran immigrant, about Elsi’s nephew. This account is itself framed within interviews of Elsi by Antonio, a novelist and the creator of a database of recorded abduction stories. Such games of Telephone distance the reader from the trauma. But when we finally hear what happened to Elsi’s nephew, there is no escape from pain.
The main narrative involves the wry, Julio Cortázar-quoting, Leonora Carrington-loving Antonio, who is dying in his native Bogotá years after being deported there. His two American-born daughters are Ada, an architect in California, and Eva, an installation artist who moved to Colombia to be with her dad. They were children when agents abducted Antonio as he drove them to school in San Francisco. Such scenes of banal daily life also frame each abduction story in Antonio’s database: The reader understands how close to home the threat can be.
Ada films her father’s capture on her phone, and the video goes viral. Cárdenas presents this crisis in the mediated way many people learn of American abductions — through virality, scrolling, online spectacle. Technology is the novel’s formal ploy and thematic question: How do we resolve harm done by surveillance technology if the same technology is our means to convey that harm?
Cárdenas’s answer is that other technology: art. Four chapters titled “Interpretations” are abductee stories told in the voices of dream interpreters named for artists, all with Latin American ties — Amparo Dávila, the Mexican fantasist; Remedios Varo, the Surrealist painter; Lilian Serpas, the Salvadoran poet; and Auxilio Lacouture, Bolaño’s fictional stand-in for the Uruguayan poet Alcira Soust Scaffo.
The artists in this Elysian justice league emote like comics but figure in dead-serious stories of the unnamed and unseen: caged children drugged with Benztropine, daughters sold for adoption. 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.
AMERICAN ABDUCTIONS | By Mauro Javier Cárdenas | Dalkey Archive | 225 pp. | Paperback, $17.95
