False war A novel

Cuban writer Álvarez (The Fallen) constructs a mesmerizing novel out of vignettes featuring characters who left Castro's Cuba only to experience more dispossession and indignity. It begins with a character known as the Adolescent who makes his way from Mexico City to Miami, where a childhood acquaintance puts him up in a crowded apartment of quirky roommates. The narrative is organized in sections ranging from a few lines to several pages, many of which have provocative headings ("Sewer Rats," "Intimate Love Letters," "A Tasteless Joke"). Among their subjects are the misadventures of Barber, who learned to cut hair in a refugee camp and now puts his shop in Miami at risk by getting caught up with a group of petty thieves. Elsewhere, an unnamed dissident moves to Berlin on the dime of a human rights organization and quickly becomes disenchanted with Germany and its resistance to immigrants, especially refugees from Syria. Some stories come secondhand, like that of the Nimzowitsch Drifter, a onetime chess player in underground Havana gambling dens whose ill-fated raft voyage from Cuba Barber learns about from a client. The teeming cast is tacitly connected by a writer named False War, who tells a friend in Miami that he's imagining an amorphous book featuring "lots of characters, interlocking stories." The prose throughout is heartbreaking and incisive in its depiction of exile ("You don't belong to a place until you despise it"; "hatred became a traveling practice"). It's a challenging and deeply satisfying work. Agent: Paula Canal, Indent Literary. (Nov.)

A novel-in-fragments about the far-flung, often broken lives of Cubans and Cuban refugees. Álvarez's second work of fiction--followingThe Fallen (2020)--is billed as a novel, though it more closely resembles a linked-story collection where each piece is shattered and reshuffled. In one section, a Cuban refugee nicknamed Fanboy describes a trip to the Louvre with his girlfriend, Elis; in another, Ines, based in Miami, consults with clients at an "Exceptional Concerns Clinic" in a role that seems part psychiatrist, part spiritual adviser. In a section titled "Usual Suspects," a group of adolescents navigate Havana streets at night; in another, a barber works with clients who've made the trek to America, while in yet another an author attempts to gather his observations into a novel titledFalse War. At first, Álvarez's approach seems less prismatic than scrambled, which makes the narrative difficult to penetrate. But the deliberate lack of clear footholds is part of the point: He wants to emphasize the individuality of his characters' journeys and blunt any reader's attempt to reduce them to types. (As one character puts it: "One thing I realized about art is it tries to confuse you, and sometimes you don't know who's what.") To that end, the range of characters is an asset: Among the strongest are Fanboy, who feels displaced not just as Cuban in Miami but a macho baseball fan in Paris; a speed-chess master recalling his hustles; and an exile heading to Germany to share his story. There are pungent lines about the anxiety of exile throughout: Havana is "a city of many stray sadnesses." Still, some more narrative coherence might better sell the point. A multivalent if often overly knotty portrait of alienation. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.