Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on November 3, 2020
Aphasia consists of a handful of sentences. The sentences roam and meander for pages before marching to a halt. To his credit, Mauro Javier Cárdenas breaks up the sentences with commas and dashes and parentheticals so that, with a bit of concentration, it’s possible to follow them to the end. Aphasia isn’t Ulysses. Still, the style makes Aphasia a challenge to read. Readers who admire “page turners” with short sentences and five paragraph chapters — techniques that create the illusion of a fast-moving plot by giving the reader little content to test their attention spans — might detest Aphasia.
Antonio is a reader. Antonio's narrative makes reference to various works of literature, often drawing parallels to his own life. Antonio has two daughters and an ex-wife. He works as a database analyst for an insurance company. He thinks of himself as playing at that job while he writes a novel. For twelve years, Antonio has spent his free time working on a novel that is set in Bogotá. To that end he interviews and records his mother, Leonora, both to get information about family history and to find a voice in which to tell the story.
Much of Aphasia consists of transcribed or recalled conversations and Antonio’s editorial asides. In addition to conversations with Leonora, we read about Antonio’s conversations with his ex-wife Ida (who tells Antonio stories about her Czech parents) and his sister Estela. Antonio learns from them that his father sexually abused his sister and a stepdaughter, but Estela insists that their mother sexually abused Antonio. Since Estela suffers from a serious mental illness, it is difficult to separate her delusions from reality, although the illness appears to have developed later in her life, after she finished college. Leonora, however, believes that her husband abused Estela because she has heard stories about incestuous behavior within his family. Where the truth lies is something of a mystery to Antonio and the reader.
In any event, Antonio feels pained about his role in having his sister institutionalized. Later, after her release, Estela faces criminal charges for an incident with a knife and fears deportation — yet another source of anxiety for Antonio. He also has reservations about his dating site hookups, particularly when his neighbors lodge noise complaints that anger his ex-wife.
To what do these long sentences add up? By the end, Aphasia reads as a domestic drama told from Antonio’s ambivalent point of view. The novel’s title refers to (in Antonio’s words) “inability to comprehend and form language because of a dysfunction in specific brain regions” but Antonio tells us that it is also a metaphor for excessive paralysis, an apt description of Antonio’s life. The one lesson that Antonio internalizes from the people he’s talked to is that no matter how you live your life, it slips away. You need to figure out what you want to do and do it before it’s lights out. It’s always good to be reminded of that, although it’s a fairly common theme.
I’m not sure why Cárdenas’ settled on this writing style — run-on sentences that go on for pages. I assume he was trying to make a point but I struggled to grasp it. Life is challenging and so is my writing?
Is Aphasia worth the challenge? Some aspects of the novel, including recollections of life in Columbia and Czechia, are interesting, as is Estela’s paranoia about her family and Barack Obama. But Antonio isn’t very interesting. I’m not usually thrilled with novels by writers who write about being writers, while Antonio’s observations about more substantial literary figures add little to the story. The novel peters out without resolving any of the storylines in Antonio’s present and it’s never clear that he learned the full story of his parents’ past. In the end, this novel of Antonio’s ambivalence left me ambivalent.
RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS