“Threads are woven in an often-dazzling performance akin to a DJ’s mashup, in which two different songs can be heard separately as well as together … Cárdenas’s deft characterization of Antonio’s confused, troubled masculinity is one of the novel’s most impressive achievements.”
—Wilson McBee, Southwest Review
“It’s the ‘as it’s happening’ narration style that makes Cárdenas’s new work so innovative and exciting to read. It takes one of the oldest adages about the novel and spins it anew: novels help us understand what it’s like to be inside someone’s head.”
—Amy Pedulla, Chicago Review of Books
“The nonstop engine of Cárdenas’ prose [and] this quirky, playfully difficult novel will appeal to fans of Latin American fiction that navigates the bleeding edge of experimentation.”
—Diego Báez, Booklist
“[A] manic comic novel.”
—The New York Times (New & Noteworthy)
“Reading Aphasia bears similarities to the split reality of living on- and offline. It also echoes the deeper divide of existing between countries, establishing roots in a new place while tending to connections in an old one … [Aphasia] dramatizes our growing ability to occupy multiple narratives at once—and proves that literature itself can do the same.”
—Lily Meyer, High Country News
“Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s Aphasia batters at the limits of guilt, of masculinity, of love and promiscuity, of the American family and English syntax.”
—Nicole Krauss, author of To Be a Man and The History of Love
“Cárdenas has knocked down the novel as we know it and built a cathedral out of the debris. Aphasia is monumental, funny, potent, and fresh. It marks a new beginning.”
—Carlos Fonseca, author of Natural History
“Brainy and decadent, playful and outrageous, Aphasia marks the comeback of the Self in a spiraling trip into contemporary manhood and the Latin American spirit. It will render you speechless.”
—Pola Oloixarac, author of Mona