Carlos Manuel \u00c1lvarez\u2019s second novel is a hugely rewarding, polyphonic narrative of migration from Cuba. Through its characters\u2019 rich and eccentric interior worlds, it gives articulation to people whose lives are often reduced to stereotypes and offers a new vision of migration.<\/p>\n
False War is comprised mostly of 13 interconnected storylines, which alternate irregularly in short episodes. The stories have different timelines and vary significantly in their portrayals of an array of characters, many from Havana, \u201ca city of many stray sadnesses\u201d.<\/p>\n
The novel is also broken up at the midpoint by two \u201cInterludes\u201d. In the second of these, an \u201cexile\u201d who has just come home \u201cdoesn\u2019t understand yet what kind of plot his return has planted in him\u201d. This line resonates across the novel\u2019s dense, fragmented narrative. Characters struggle to understand the trajectories of their lives, the currents they are moving with or against, the plots they\u2019ve fallen into or that have been \u201cplanted\u201d in them. The line also speaks to the novel\u2019s structure more generally, as connections between the stories and their sometimes overlapping characters emerge slowly and unexpectedly, combining genre modes and confounding conventions of plot.<\/p>\n
False War doesn\u2019t dwell on dangerous passages, precarious border crossings, struggles of integration, or detention (though one character briefly recalls his harrowing incarceration at Guant\u00e1namo Bay). It certainly doesn\u2019t diminish the many violences inflicted on migrants, but is nevertheless eager to move away from stereotypical scenes. Instead, \u00c1lvarez is interested in the meandering thoughts of his characters as they drift around Miami Beach or the outer zones of Havana, and in tracking their impulses, desires, obsessions and the idiosyncratic stories they share with each other.<\/p>\n
Its power lies in its depictions of a stuckness less related to geography than to the psychological borders that separate people<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The novel specialises in evocative accounts of the unspectacular \u2013 from the opening imagery of the \u201cprimordial gas stations of America\u201d, to a man entertaining himself in a doctor\u2019s office by sardonically reading a travel magazine article on \u201chow to choose the best cruise ship experience\u201d. There are moments of violence and loss, but they are often muted by layers of storytelling. In fact, the power of the novel derives from its depictions of a kind of stuckness that is less related to geography than to the psychological borders that separate people, and to failures of communication.<\/p>\n
False War\u2019s interest in the ostensibly ordinary lives of its characters extends to unheralded places – or at least the idea of them. Though the journeys its characters have made or plan to make are generally from Havana to Miami, often via Mexico City (with episodes in New York, Berlin and Paris, too), it is quick to remind us that \u201cnone of these places are far-off\u201d. Indeed, as \u201cthe exile\u201d poignantly notes, the \u201creal far-flung place is the rural village, this little piece of land in the middle of nowhere. There\u2019s no proof of its existence, and therefore it is truly extraordinary to be here, where his sister never got to leave, and where, by extension, she never was.\u201d<\/p>\n
The novel of interlocking stories is not a new thing, but \u00c1lvarez\u2019s narrative is multiply fragmented. Its strands include several distinct first-person narratives, close and distant third person, and second person address. Their temporalities shift, and some strands even have distinct genres; one is autofictional and another noirish, for instance. Nevertheless, a coherence emerges through the autofictional strand, which shares its title with the novel. Late on, its narrator reflects on the nature of the book he is writing and stories he is trying to tell: \u201cthe coherence of this splintered emotional grammar could only be maintained on the page, as text, with me as the magnet unable to attract all the fragments to myself and therefore going where the fragments happened to be\u201d.<\/p>\n
Though this illuminates the organisational logic of False War by naming its ostensible centre, the book remains capacious, irreducible and resistant to national allegory. The interconnected stories of its often-floundering individuals are never meant to add up to a coherent story of the struggle of a people. Yet a loose sense of shared experience does come into view through oblique metaphors. In one late scene, a woman called Elis, who appears in four story strands, walks into her closet at the end of a long day and falls asleep standing up. When her partner arrives home with their children, she stays still and hidden, for reasons she doesn\u2019t entirely understand. This is typical of the novel\u2019s use of metaphor. Elis isn\u2019t sure why she has gone into the closet, \u201chas no way of justifying why she was there\u201d, but decides to stay, \u201cto see how it all ended up\u201d.<\/p>\n
It is easy to imagine many of the novel\u2019s characters in this situation: seeking temporary sanctuary, unsure of what is to come, and unable to decode their own actions. False War is a rich and capacious novel that has much to say about our contemporary moment.<\/p>\n