False War
Description
The characters in False Warare ambivalent castaways living lives of deep estrangement from their home country, stranded in an existential no-man's land. Some of them want to leave and can't, others left and never quite finished getting anywhere. In this choral novel, employing a dazzling range of narrative styles from noir to autofiction, Carlos Manuel Álvarez brings together a series of interconnected stories of the perennially displaced. From Havana to Mexico City to Miami, from New York to Paris to Berlin, whether toiling in a barber shop, lost in the Louvre, competing in a chess hall in Cuba, plotting a theft, or on a trip for émigré dissidents, these characters learn that while they may appear to be on the move, in reality they are paralysed, living in permanent stasis. With a fractured narrative that brilliantly reflects the disintegration that comes with uprooting, full of tenderness, disenchantment and melancholy, False Waris an extraordinary novel that confirms Carlos Manuel Álvarez as one of the indispensable voices of his generation.
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Carlos Manuel Álvarez is the author of The Fallen and The Tribe, and has written for the New York Times, El País and the Washington Post. He was selected as one of the twenty best Latin American writers born in the 1980s at the Guadalajara Book Fair; he was included in the Bogotá39 list of the best Latin American writers under 40; and he was chosen by a panel of judges for inclusion in Granta's second Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists issue. He is the recipient of the Anagrama Chronicle Prize for Los Intrusos and the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde for the French translation of his novel The Fallen.
