False War

Reviews / Votes

'The dissidents, migrants and exiles of False War travel the world in search of some kind of refuge, but the cities they arrive in are places of purgatory, allegorical waystations of the permanently displaced, where everyone is an outsider, caught between landfalls, hurrying nowhere: "Brightness inside, darkness outside - until we crash." This is a timeless and urgent work, in turns lyrical, hardboiled, tender, fragmented. It maps a way forward for the twenty-first century novel.'

- Jeet Thayil, author of Names of the Women 'What happens when exile becomes style, and style becomes a kind of home? False War is that question asked with tenderness, fury and precision.'

- Carlos Fonseca, author of Austral 'Carlos Manuel Alvarez's second novel is a hugely rewarding, polyphonic narrative of migration from Cuba. Through its characters' rich and eccentric interior worlds, it gives articulation to people whose lives are often reduced to stereotypes and offers a new vision of migration.... False War is a rich and capacious novel that has much to say about our contemporary moment.'

- Arin Keeble, Guardian '[In] a magisterial translation by Natasha Wimmer, [False War] examines the destinies of some of those Cubans who have fled the embattled island. It is a sprawling, polyphonic novel, fuelled by fury and empathy ... it thrums with the truth of lived experience.'

- Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times 'Alvarez has not fashioned a linear story, but braided these threads together into a polyphonic motet of voices that are alternately sardonic, weary and, above all, angry. It is a tribute to Wimmer's peerless translation that she effortlessly captures their range, cadence, humour and rage.... False War is a poignant study of exile and exclusion, one that avoids the easy tropes of nostalgia and sentimentality: for Alvarez, exile is not an escape but a condition - permanent, internal and profoundly personal.'

- Frank Wynne, Irish Times 'I was blown away by this novel. Nothing in the story is reducible. Its formal ambition is met by its execution, and the effect is staggering. Alvarez is an immense writer, a generational talent, and this, for me, is a generation-defining work.'

- Michael Magee, author of Close to Home 'A new Latin American literature is here: With precocious mastery of a paragon of narrative resources and an overwhelming sensibility, Carlos Manuel Alvarez portrays the only identity that truly matters - not the national one, but the human one.'

- Emiliano Monge, author of What Goes Unsaid 'This swirl of stories felt to me like a blue-collar version of Bolano's The Savage Detectives. Instead of poets, the drifting young people of False War seem like a chorus of the dispossessed, [their] ordinary lives portrayed with extraordinary intensity. It's an incredibly poignant novel, and Alvarez is a writer who deserves a much wider audience in the English-speaking world.'

- Hari Kunzru, author of Blue Ruin 'Human displacement is the storm surge of our century, yet we only hear of the crest. Behind that swell rush the sequels of individual souls on the move, swirling, unravelling, adrift. Alvarez reels us into those milieus with such engaging detail we can't help becoming comrades to his fugitives. A brilliant work of enchantingly real voices.'

- DBC Pierre, author of Meanwhile in Dopamine City 'How do we recount the story of migration? Where does it begin and where does the journey end? Can a story have as a protagonist the very act of migrating due to exile or dissidence? In his new novel False War, Carlos Manuel Alvarez does exactly that: he puts the act of fleeing at the center, and does so through characters that find themselves in the midst of a radical transfer.... Time in this novel passes in a space that hasn't yet been occupied - an impasse of open possibilities and discovery.'

- Julieta Venegas, Gatopardo 'A seething race across countries and heads, from Mexico City's congested streets to Berlin's ghostly quiet, and on.... With exact translation by Natasha Wimmer, the book is like a collection of migrant tales, inextricably woven together in harmonious echoes - sometimes bound together by character, but often by similar preoccupations with displacement, identity, and desire. Alvarez's writing is mesmerizing - his rhythm propulsive, his vision unflinching.... A compelling and necessary book that lingers in the mind long after reading.'

- Leo Boix, Morning Star 'The prose is so immediate, so vital, you feel like you're right there with the characters, wandering around town thirsty on a baking day or breaking into a house at night and raiding the fridge. In False War, we ride along with immigrant characters - who are all at varying stages of their journeys - including Fanboy, Barber, Instrumentalist, Juan, Elis and Rodriguez through first days, earthquakes, flatshares, nights out and prison stints. Translated here by Natasha Wimmer, Alvarez isn't afraid to follow his impulses on pace or tone, whether that takes him to mystery, grief or comedy: there's a particularly virtuosic section where Fanboy gets lost in the Louvre.... If you want a book that feels quite like nothing you've read before, try this.'

- Shortlist 'Alvarez paints this generational tapestry with lush and colorful prose that is exuberant and rich, with brushstrokes of infinite tenderness, occasional violence, humour tinged with nostalgia, and critique towards a society that squashed the dreams of its residents in its attempt to reach the goal of utopia. The pages that take place in Mexico City and Berlin can serve as a clear example of how we find ourselves with an uncommon narrator, capable of speaking in his own voice about the eternal topics of loss and exile.'

- Juan Cervera, Rockdelux 'In False War, defeat is like an ocean that connects stories from different narrators in different parts of the globe that all converge in the present, forming an archipelago in which the collective trauma of loss ends up emerging not as a national singularity but as a sign of the times, one of the scars of humanity today.'

- Nelson Cardenas, Revista UNAM Natasha Wimmer is the translator of nine books by Roberto Bolano, including The Savage Detectives and 2666. Her recent translations include Nona Fernandez's Voyager and Alvaro Enrigue's You Dreamed of Empires. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and a visiting lecturer at Princeton University and Columbia University. She is the recipient of a PEN Translation Award and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.