American Abductions

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)